I waved back to Speer. He readied to jump, flipping a lever as he did. The small zeppelin turned quickly away as he leapt.
The Highwhale’s driver just then swung his airship back into us. Speer nearly overshot the catwalk, landed on the railing, and doubled over it into the empty space beyond.
He caught onto the handrails’ spindles, saving himself. I grabbed hold of him as he climbed back onto the catwalk, and we collapsed onto the decking.
I was breathing hard. So was he.
The knot I’d made held. Speer had rigged the pilotless zeppelin to run at full power, pulling the Highwhale in the opposite direction.
“Not much power compared to this industrial carrier,” Speer said, “but it will make the thing harder to steer, and slow them down some.”
“Every second counts.”
“Speaking of which,” he said, drawing his revolver. “Ready?”
Not especially. I pulled my Glock. “Of course.”
A stairway led up to the gondola’s belly. At the top of the stairs was a door. Locked, naturally.
He leveled his gun at the lock. “If rockets won’t bring it down, I imagine we needn’t worry about stray bullets.”
“Let me. More rounds, remember?”
“Use them for suppressing fire. If they don’t yet realize we’ve boarded them, they’re about to.”
As he shot out the lock, I kicked in the door and blindly fired two shots into the narrow hallway beyond.
Speer had been right — my rounds didn’t hit anyone, but I scared them enough that their return fire didn’t hit us.
Speer pushed me back and hurriedly closed the metal door, the rounds heavy enough to dent it.
The shots were overlapping, meaning there was more than one shooter. But one of the guns fell silent with a ping before beginning to fire again.
“It’s one of our rifles. They ping when they eject their clip,” Speer said. “Next ping you hear, we charge.”
I nodded. We weren’t in a position to see the Towers, but over the railing I could see the city unfolding beneath us, dense with buildings. We were getting close to downtown.
More shots. One of the enemy rifles pinged.
Speer shouldered open the door and fired his revolver like a madman. I followed, holding my fire for fear of hitting him. The wall of lead he threw up was enough to suppress the shooters, and we crossed the distance to where the narrow passageway came to a large mess room.
There was a shooter on either side of the hall, both female, wearing traditional Muslim garb.
Speer went for the one on the right, who’d been ducking behind the wall for cover. His revolver was empty. He grabbed her rifle barrel as she tried to level it and brought his own gun smashing against her temple, continuing to rain down blows as she fell to the deck.
The one on the left was the shooter whose gun had pinged — when I came on her, she’d been reloading.
Through the slit in the fabric covering her face, I saw her wide green eyes. Then I put a bullet into one of them.
I looked over at Speer as he pulled off the mask covering his shooter’s face.
She was white and no older than twenty, with a sprinkling of freckles over a nose that, until Speer had shattered it, was no doubt cute. Her hair, once dirty blonde, had been stained an absolute red by the blood coming from her mouth, nose and ear. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling dead and unseeing.
“Fairer sex, my eye,” he muttered.
I searched their bodies quickly for more weapons we might be able to use, but they’d only had the rifles.
Speer grabbed both of the rifles, slung one over his shoulder, and held the other at the ready.
“The airship’s bridge will be this way,” he said, and we rushed through the mess area and a kitchen. We passed doors as we ran — bunks and storage closets, probably — and I wondered if someone might be hiding behind them. I did my best to keep checking behind us to make sure we weren’t ambushed.
We came to the bridge, its large, panoramic windows looking out onto Boothcross. The southern Faced Tower’s sculpted head was huge and close. There couldn’t be a minute or two left before we smashed into it.
In front of the ship’s wheel and levers was Mohammad Talib. I could barely see him because he was crouched behind a white woman, holding a knife to her throat.
“Stay back!” he shouted. The woman screamed and struggled weakly, a fistful of her hair in Talib’s hand.
“I don’t have a clear shot!” I got ready to shoot her in the leg so she’d drop and I could take Talib.
“Not to worry,” Speer said as he opened fire. His rifle quickly blew four holes through the woman and into Talib. Both fell to the deck in a heap, blood everywhere.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted. I’d been to the scenes of execution-style homicides. The casual coldness of those murders is their most striking feature. You can tell right away that whoever did it had something missing, some key ingredient that makes us fully human.
I suddenly saw the same absence of humanity in Hiram Speer. It made me wonder if the Steamies in the Tower were worth saving. After all, they’d chosen a monster like him to be their guardian.
Speer quickly checked to make sure Talib was dead before rushing to the controls. “Tunnel vision is a cardinal sin, Hoff. In the corner, there’s a pile of black clothing. No doubt her religious garb. She was one of them.”
I looked and saw that he was right. Relief washed over me. But it quickly dissolved in the face of the rapidly approaching Faced Tower.
“Dammit,” Speer said. “The Arab bastard broke the lateral controls. We can’t just gain altitude and sail over the Towers.” We couldn’t have been more than a quarter-mile from the Tower — it was enormous, filling our wide windows.
Speer turned the wheel hard to the right while throwing a lever. I heard the engines stopping, but we were still moving forward. Another lever thrown, and painfully slow, the ship began to turn.
“Come on, dammit,” Speer said, leaning into the wheel with all his weight as it shook in his hands.
It was hard to gauge our true distance since the front of the Highwhale’s rigid structure extended about a hundred yards forward of the gondola. But we were closing too fast — no doubt about that.
Finally the airship began to break hard to the right.
“We’re not going to make it,” I said.
“We will,” he said, his face red, willing the ship to change course.
The Highwhale began to turn more swiftly. In the rightmost part of the control room’s windows, I could see open sky.
Seconds passed painfully, more open sky coming into view.
Finally, the turn was almost complete, all of the forward windows clear of any buildings.
Then there was a terrible rumble and screech from above us.
“We’ve hit the building!”
“Just grazing it with the outer hull,” Speer said.
Seconds later, the screeching and rending of metal stopped.
The sudden silence was unreal. The engines were dead, and we were now simply drifting in the night sky. The only sound was the low buzz of our pocket-zep still pulling at the airship.
My senses finally focusing on things that didn’t present an immediate threat, I noticed the outfit of the woman Speer had shot. She was wearing overalls, like a mechanic. Stitched into the material was an emblem for the Blue Cliffs Industrial Airship Yard.
He saw me looking at her. “Despite what you probably think,” Speer said, “some women do have careers here. She must have been the one driving the airship. That’ll teach the equality fetishists to be more circumspect when hiring.”