"I hate bombing civilians," Vicki Cofflin said quietly.
"Don't we all," the XO of Emancipator replied.
"Even worse, that bastard Walker's not at home." Vicki sighed. "Well, we have to try and take out his factories." Louder: "Helm, come about to two-two-zero."
The dirigible throbbed about them; the crew were muffled in heavy wool trousers and jackets of glazed sheepskin and knitted wool caps. The thin air was damp and chilly, smelling of machine oil and wicker and tanned whale intestine. Into a patch of cloud and they lost starlight and moonlight. Darkness fell inside the craft save for a few faint lights from the instruments; then silvery light flooded them again as they broke free. The patches of clear air were growing fewer and smaller.
"Hell of a tail wind," Alex Stoddard said. His eyes flicked to the instruments. "Better than forty knots-our ground speed must be up around a hundred mph."
Damn, Vicki thought. Too fast for comfort.
It made her nervous, especially with a mountain range nearly eight thousand feet high to the west of the target and another one only a couple of thousand feet lower to the left. She looked down from the commander's seat onto the crumpled, mountain-strewn landscape of southern Greece, then over at the map table.
"Observers to their stations," she said.
Several of the crewfolk scattered, to point binoculars out ports in the wicker sides of the gondola. Waiting stretched; she sipped cocoa from a thermos and monitored pressure, fuel consumption, and ballast status.
"Skipper!" That brought her over to the portside observer. "That's Mount Taygetos!"
She took the binoculars herself. Single sharp triangular peak, knife ridge running north, she quoted to herself. That was it, snow-stark like a single fang pointing skyward through a gap in the clouds. Which meant…
"Goddammit, we're too far north!"
"Wind's rising and the barometer's falling. Skipper," Alex said quietly.
"How do you feel about aborting, and trying to dock at Hattusas, with no proper mooring tower there and fifteen thousand pounds of mixed incendiaries and gunpowder bombs racked at the keel?" she asked.
"Not very good, ma'am," the XO said. His face was underlit by the instruments, turning it half-Satanic as he grinned. "Of course, there's always the miracle of the bombs and the fishes."
Vicki grunted. Damned if I'm going to waste all this ordnance blowing up inoffensive squid and tuna, she decided; the thought offended her thrifty Nantucket soul.
"We'll take her in." A quick mental calculation; the airship was pointed straight for Walkeropolis, but the wind would take them well north of it. "Left fifty, rudder. Engines all ahead full. Altitude control?"
"Eight thousand two hundred seventy feet," came the crisp reply.
The drone of the engines rose to a snarling bellow. The fabric of the ship creaked and bent as the engines pushed it against the wind.
"Prepare to vent. Neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet," she said. "Vent-off superheat!"
"Superheat off-vent!"
The hissing roar of hot exhaust being funneled into the central gasbag cut off. Sharp clicking and groaning sounds followed as it cooled, and then more as hands spun the wheels that opened big flaps on the upper surface of the Emancipator.
There was a faint, edge-of-perception sensation like a descending elevator.
That brought a few silent winces; awfully low, with high winds, in this type of terrain. It was also the only way to get a radius-of-error less than a couple of miles when it came to aiming bombs. Walkeropolis wasn't a completely defenseless target the way Nineveh and Asshur had been, where they could loiter a few hundred feet up in broad daylight. Great Achaea had rockets, upward-firing rifled cannon, barrage balloons; and the Republic had only this one highly explosive airship, plus another knocked down in the holds of the fleet sailing against Tartessos.
"Listen up, people!" she said, a little louder.
That meant everyone could hear her, except the Gatling crew in the observation bubble topside. She pressed the button on the intercom so that they could listen too.
"We're going to make one run, straight in, and bomb whatever we can get over. The crate is going to head for the Goddamned moon when we shed all that weight. Keep your hands on the valve and ballast controls, and keep your ears open for the word."
A murmur, taut readiness. She nodded and kept her eyes and binoculars scanning through the slanted windows to either side of the commander's chair. Black night outside, and the hiss of rain starting to strike the tight doped fabric stretched over the Emancipator's hull.
"Vents closed-neutral buoyancy at three thousand feet."
God-damn this cloud. God-damn me; I could be back in Nantucket Town, making babies and teaching people how to fly ultralights… after this stinking war is over I am definitely going to ask Alex for that date…
"There!" she said, an involuntary exclamation.
Thunder rumbled above them. Lightning glinted off the Eurotas, just like the maps for one bright instant. For a while she'd been afraid they were going to end up in Italy. Or the way this damned gale was blowing, in China.
"Right fifty, helm."
The dirigible's nose turned right in a descending curve that brought her facing north as she fell. The gondola rocked, the craft pitching and rolling a little in the more turbulent air near the surface.
"She's slightly heavy, Skipper."
"That's the rain. On superheat-ten percent ought to do her."
Vicki kept her eye peeled to port, where the tree-clad mountains seemed to reach for her with crooked witch-fingers every time one of the lightning bolts struck. Emancipator was well below the level of the peaks now; she'd have to crane her head to see them. All her attention was focused northward. Walkeropolis didn't have a blackout; but it didn't have electric light, either. Lanterns ought to stand out, or forge-flare from the manufactories.
"Latest report from Meteorology, ma'am-HQ says a major weather system is building up clear from the Pillars to here."
No kidding; black above as a yard up a hog's arse, except for the increasingly frequent flash of lightning, as often horizontal as down to the ground below. She made herself not think about what one of those bolts into an engine or the metallic fasteners of the hull would do. The wind was picking up, too.
"Fire up the searchlight." Alex looked at her. "We'll be bombing blind, otherwise."
He nodded and unstrapped himself, lifting a hatch on the laminated-wood deck. It held a crank, and he worked that to open the doors below and lower the searchlight out into the airstream. An aluminum tube rose as he did so. Into that he thrust a metal rod with a small wheel on the end; there was a chink-chunk: sound as it fit into the sleeve of the universal joint. Forward or back on the rod would turn the searchlight under the gondola's chin up or down; a twist on the wheel to port or starboard.
"Searchlight… on!"
Light glinted up through gaps in the hatchway. Much more poured down on the landscape below. She could see the tops of trees swaying, the slick line of a wet asphalt highway. And… there, ahead and to port! Buildings, a great clump of them. The stubby brick pyramids of blast furnaces against a hillside, and the courtyard-and-siding arrangement of manufacturing plant downslope of them, all neat and tiny like a model on a table.
Easier to think of it as a model, not as homes…
"Horizontal rudder, left ten," she said, her voice smooth and cool and remote. "Engines, ahead three-quarters." The roar of the Cessna pistons muted slightly. Over it, thunder rolled frighteningly close. "Bomb-bay doors open." The airship's ride grew noticeably rougher, as the panels opened and caught the slipstream. "Bomb-aimer, over to you."