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 George and Sophie, who were huddled behind the conning tower.
Dr Tremaine may have a magically enhanced aerial weapon platform, Aubrey decided, holding onto his beret with both hands, but someone quick-thinking in the Albion military had decided that two could play that game.
He signalled to his friends and then he ran for the nearest deckhouse – a narrow structure near the gun turret – and flung it open. He took one last look at the crazily brave A 405 and its crew firing for all they were worth and he wished them well. If it didn’t take any more damage, it should be able to land safely, but it wasn’t about to continue the battle, which was a pity. More ornithopters were joining the fray, however, as the pilots came to terms with the altitude enhancers. In the distance, a brace of incendiary devices struck a destroyer. It was ablaze, but still kept formation in the dogged circling of Trinovant.
Aubrey found himself in an ammunition supply shaft, something that he wasn’t sanguine about. When under attack, he would have preferred not being near ordnance or anything else explosive. He climbed down the ladder hastily, to allow his friends to escape from the dangerously exposed deck. The deckhouse hatch slammed shut, George crying out that they were all safe. Aubrey descended faster, past the racks and racks of shells waiting to be fed into the hungry maws of the guns above.
At the bottom of the shaft was the generous powder and shot magazine, which not only provided the shells for the big guns, but was also one of the main stores for the ammunition for the rest of the ship’s armaments. A knuckle rap confirmed that the walls were far thicker than in the rest of the ship, which was sensible even in a ship made of cloudstuff, as the munitions store was a place that any enemy would love to hit. Aubrey found time – a lingering instant or two – to admire the magically enhanced conveyance and loading apparatus, a combination of clever machinery and friction-reducing spellwork that worked entirely without human intervention. Remarkable stuff.
When Aubrey reached the bottom of the shaft, he waited anxiously for his friends to join him while the Sylvia rang to the battle around it. Caroline steered him out of the munitions store and onto a heavy meshed walkway. It extended out over a dark and clangorous area that shook with the hammering of pumps, so his ears had no respite from the assault they had been exposed to. Again, Aubrey wondered at Dr Tremaine’s efforts at verisimilitude. The ship had no water to pump out of the hold – what was the point of operational pumps?