“You two,” said Grey, gesturing to two men with big fowling pieces, “watch this damn well. If anything tries to crawl up you send it back to hell. Got it?”
They were scared, but they nodded and took up stations on either side of the well, barrels laid on the edge and angled down.
A burst of thunder made Grey spin around and he saw bright blue fire swirling amid the storm winds. Not thunder, after all. No — it was one of Saint’s balloon bombs. His little disasters. His bad stars filled with ghost rock smoke and his own version of Greek fire.
One of them had exploded above the sandbag barrier on the east side of town.
Grey took a breath, checked the rounds in his guns, and ran off that way.
Chapter Eighty-Two
As he approached the eastern barrier, he saw that there was a real fight in progress, so he poured it on. The men along the sandbag wall were firing as flaming debris drifted down from the sky and dark shapes flitted and dodged all around. At first Grey thought that a swarm of birds, driven wild by the storm, had flocked in panic toward the waiting men. But that wasn’t it at all.
Instead he saw that there were dozens of small things — not true birds but some kind of clockwork devices made to look like birds — swarming down from a dark cloud. Then he realized that it wasn’t a cloud at all. With a sudden surge the great sky frigate smashed through the wall of clouds. Men lined the rails of the airship now, and they trained rifles down at the town and fired, fired, fired. The plunging fire was deadly and defender after defender went spinning backward from the wall, trailing lines of bright blood.
Grey expected to see gun ports open and cannons roll out, but either great guns were too heavy for the lighter-than-air craft, or Deray was saving them for later. Either way, it was rifle fire for now, and that was deadly enough.
More of the small mechanical birds swarmed over the rails and flew toward the defenders. Grey couldn’t understand what their purpose was. They were too small to carry any useful amounts of explosive. Then, as the first wave of them approached, he saw something that chilled him to the bone. The birds darted high, then snapped down into steep diving attacks and as they fell their wings folded back, their tiny mouths gaped wide and slender steel needles thrust outward. Some dark chemical was smeared on each needle.
“Ware!” cried Saint. “Ware the birds. Don’t let them—.”
The birds slammed into the sandbags and into the men behind them. The needles stabbed through jackets and shirts and deep into muscle tissue. Men swatted at them, and one man even laughed as he plucked the tiny needle from the bulk of his massive shoulder.
A split second later the man cried out and staggered, his eyes going wide, mouth open, skin turning bright red. He took three clumsy steps backward and then fell onto his knees as blood erupted from eyes, ears, nose, and his open mouth. He flopped onto his face, his entire body shuddering.
Five others went down the same way, bleeding and convulsing.
Doctor Saint sent another of the little disasters up into the path of the second wave of birds and pressed the button. The explosion threw everyone flat and painted the sky and the landscape in azure light that was so bright it seemed to stab all the way into the mind. Grey flung an arm across his face to protect his eyes from the flaming debris. When he risked a look he saw that the sky was empty of the needle-birds. However, Deray’s sharpshooters were preparing a fresh volley. Before Grey could shout a warning they fired, and bullets punched into many of the dazed survivors.
Grey drew his Lazarus pistol and returned fire, but the range was too long for a handgun to be of any use.
“Don’t waste your ammunition,” said Saint, waving him off.
“Then you do something, God damn it!”
“I am, dear boy,” rasped the scientist, fiddling with the controls on his little metal box. Two more of the little disasters came hurrying out of the rain and soared upward. The gunfire above changed as Deray ordered his men to target the balloons. The doctor’s bombs were forty feet away when the first one popped as bullets pierced it. The mechanism and its explosives dropped harmlessly down into a puddle of rainwater. The second was nicked and gas began hissing out of it, but the impellor motor kept pushing it upward.
“Do it now!” cried Grey, and Saint pressed the button.
The little disaster was still twenty feet from the side of the frigate, but the blast swept the rail with brilliant blue fire. Men screamed and fell back, some of them ablaze, others beating at flames on their coats. How the chemicals Saint devised were able to burn in the wind and rain was beyond Grey, but it worked. The only thing that mattered was that it worked.
Deray, unharmed but furious, roared to his pilot and pointed wildly toward the south. Clearly he did not want to face those bombs.
“He’s running,” said one of the wounded men at the barrier.
“I think his balloon is filled with hydrogen,” said Saint. “Mmm. Stupid choice. Highly flammable.”
“Hit ’em again,” Grey pleaded. “See if you can blow that bastard out of the sky. Maybe his troops will give it up if he’s dead.”
“Worth a try, my boy, worth a try.” He sent two more of the balloons after the ship. The frigate was turning, though, moving quickly away to try and find shelter within the darkness of the storm clouds. Grey heard Saint muttering, “Come on… come on…”
The frigate slipped into the cloud bank seconds ahead of the little disaster.
“I can’t see it,” complained Saint. “Damn it.”
“Blow it anyway,” snapped Grey. “Don’t let it get away.”
The scientist pressed the button and the entire cloud bank seemed to transform into a burning sapphire. Incandescent blue light lit the clouds from within, and Grey watched in awe as ghostly lightning throbbed like veins across the flesh of the storm. Then it was gone and the clouds roiled with black fury. The wind intensified and rain fell in sheets, hammering the town. The survivors of the barrier gasped for air in the downpour. Some sat and wept, holding their dead friends in their arms, or clutching wounds whose redness seemed to be the only color left in the world.
A smiling Saint slapped Grey on the shoulder. “I think we got him.”
But Grey was far less certain about that and said as much to Saint. He watched the smile drain away from the man’s dark face.
“At least we’ve hurt him,” he said.
“Hurt him maybe,” said Grey grudgingly, “but mostly I think we’ve helped him get a good damn idea of how tough we aren’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. He’s hit us three times now with half-assed attacks,” he said, and briefly explained about the other two attempts: the pterosaurs and the centipedes.
“None of these are full-bore.”
“You think he’s testing our defenses?” asked the scientist.
“Don’t you?”
“Sadly, I do,” agreed the scientist. “Which begs the question of where and when he will launch his full assault.”
“It almost doesn’t matter. If he’s been paying attention, he’s got to see that even though we have some muscle — thanks to your gadgets — we don’t have the numbers to play this out. He can either keep chipping away at us, or he can hit us with a tidal wave and just wipe us all the hell off the board.”
“At the bridge, you mean?”
“Of course. It’s the only way to move big enough numbers into the town.”
Brother Joe and his assistants came running to help with the wounded. Grey and Saint ran off to check the various barriers. They found Jenny at the southern barrier closest to the Icarus Bridge. Beyond the bridge the tanks were rumbling slowly forward, though none of them had yet rolled onto the bridge itself. Above them, the sky frigate hung like a promise.