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.