The Zeppelin Jihad Page 4

  Speer checked his pockets. “Dammit, I’m out of mercury rounds,” he said, as if he’d have been able to hit it at this range.

  Once it was two hundred feet in the air, I heard its propeller begin to buzz, and watched as it changed direction towards Boothcross.

  “Come on!” he shouted, already running back towards the building. “Maybe Baylor can shoot it down!”

  I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast in my life. We were both shouting to get Baylor’s attention as we passed the pocket zeppelin. Baylor came out of the building. “What is it?” he yelled.

  Before we could answer, he and every other man on the yard looked up at the zeppelin now above them. Suddenly, the palette holding all those I-beams was released from the Highwhale’s body. Baylor and his men ran as, with a horrible series of clangs like gods chiming the end of the world, the I-beams fell to the earth.

  Hundreds of I-beams and the palette itself carpet-bombed the area, crushing the office building and the Triclops.

  “Well,” Speer said after the rumbling had ceased. “So much for that idea.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Now I ask if you’re afraid of heights.”

  “Um . . . no,” I said, dread creeping into me about where this was going.

  “Well, you may yet be.” I followed him to the pocket zeppelin, and he quickly threw off the anchoring lines. Then he jumped into the pilot’s seat, and told me to get in the copilot’s seat behind him.

  “Are you crazy? I’m not getting on that,” I said. It wasn’t even an enclosed gondola. In fact, it wasn’t a gondola at all—more like a motorcycle chassis realized in mahogany and brass.

  “We don’t have airships patrolling our cities. Neither the SIO nor the Army Aero Brigade will be able to scramble anything in time to intercept.”

  My heart was racing just thinking about climbing onto the thing. I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Here, put these on,” he said, handing me a pair of goggles he’d taken from a compartment. He put on a pair too. “They’ll keep the wind from freezing your eyes.”

  “Terrific,” I said. Speer released a few levers and the tiny airship came to life.

  I had the handles in a death grip as we began to drift up. I felt sick watching the altimeter mark fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred feet.

  The dust kicked up by the I-beams hadn’t settled, but I could just make out Baylor looking up at us. He and most of the men had gotten away, thank God.

  Suddenly, we banked sharply. I screamed, and double-checked my seat harness. I felt silly asking, but I couldn’t help myself. “You know how to fly this thing, right?”

  “All cadets are checked out on pocket-zeps upon joining. Although it has been a while.” He engaged another lever. The aft propeller whined, and we began tailing the industrial airship.

  Between the wind at altitude and our own speed, we had to shout to hear each other. “Do you think it’s Talib?” I asked.

  “I’d put money on it,” Speer shouted back.

  “Can we shoot it down?”

  Speer looked down. “It’s too late. We’re over a residential area.”

  Even though the height made me dizzy and I wanted to vomit, I forced myself to look.

  The gaslit streets beneath us were orange valleys, and I could see the roofs of large houses. Men no doubt worked hard to afford these nice homes, their neo-Victorian wives keeping house, their half-dozen children playing in the rolling yards.

  But there was a good amount of space between the houses, certainly less than in the denseness of downtown. “Speer, we’ve got to bring that airship down now!”

  “There are Pointer children down there!”

  “And every second we wait, there are more beneath us as we get deeper into the city!”

  “As if you care—they’re not your people!”

  No, but they were close enough. Images of the World Trade Center danced through my head. I cared about them whether he thought so or not. “Believe what you want about me, but remember: the choice is between a dozen now or thousands in a few minutes!”

  Even through his goggles, I could see the anger in his eye, the rage in him. I almost thought he’d toss me off.

  Instead, he turned back to the controls, and we began gaining altitude so that we were above the airship. “I’m going to angle down on it and fire a rocket,” he said. He pointed our nose towards the target. We were lined up right behind the Highwhale, three hundred yards away. Speer turned a valve and pulled a lever.

  A single rocket fired. I didn’t breathe as I watched it reach out into the night. I could even see its light reflecting off the big airship’s rigid hide.

  The rocket struck it towards the side and grazed off the Highwhale’s skin before traveling a little ways further and detonating harmlessly.

  “What happened?” I shouted.

  “The rocket needs to impact if it’s going to explode. We hit it at too gentle an angle. We’ve got one more. I’m going to set it to detonate in three hundred yards. If it’s close enough, the explosion should puncture the skin without the risk of deflection.”

  I nodded like I was entirely clear what that meant. Speer played with the controls, setting one of the dials to 300. Then he again angled us towards the airship, and fired. Unlike the first, this shot was centered.

  It struck the top rudder, the explosion as blinding as a .44’s muzzle flash. Speer veered off instinctively, trying to avoid having us burn in the fireball.

  He needn’t have worried. As I squinted through my goggles, I saw Talib’s airship still flying.

  “Are you kidding me?” I whispered.

  The rocket had blown apart the top rudder and left a large, smoking gash in the airship’s rigid airframe. Metal supports twisted out from the hole like a blooming flower. In the small, rapidly dying fires the rocket had caused, I could see what happened. The airframe had a secondary hull inside it, protecting the hydrogen gasbags.

  I was stunned. I’d honestly thought a match could bring down one of these things.

  I could barely hear Speer. “I’d hoped that would be enough to puncture its secondary hull,” he said. “We make them too good now. Even if we rammed it, we probably couldn’t blow up the damn thing.”

  He was quiet for a moment as smoke from the explosion washed over us. “All right, it’s time for my backup plan,” he said.

  “What’s that involve?”

  “You finding out why I wanted you along on this trip.” He angled us after Talib’s airship, and we picked up speed.

  In the distance, I could see Boothcross’s bright heart. Above the smokestacks and surrounding skyscrapers were the four Faced Towers, awash in emerald lights with their massive, stylized faces looking out over the city. Like an idol, the southern tower’s face stared directly at its approaching attacker.

  “They’re heading towards the Towers,” I yelled. “Will anyone be there this late at night?”

  “They aren’t just office buildings—hotels and shops and apartments are in there too.”

  Our rocket had slowed the airship. The airframe’s perfect smoothness ruined, it shook as it struggled to remain on course. But it still was moving relentlessly towards the Towers.

  “We’re not going to be able to stop it,” I said, softly enough that Speer didn’t hear.

  The Highwhale’s payload palette had been supported by a metal superstructure beneath the gondola. It held the palette at a dozen or more spots. Now that I was closer, I could even see the pistons that had flexed to drop those I-beams on Baylor and his men.

  But the superstructure wasn’t meant solely for connecting the payload to the airship. There were catwalks built into it, where men could walk from the airship itself to the cargo below, even in midflight.

  “Grab up one of our anchoring lines,” Speer said as he drew us just above one of those catwalks.

  I did as he said. “Got it.”


  “Very good. Now, I want you to jump down onto that catwalk and tether our zep to it quick as you can.”

  “Are you crazy? That’s a ten-foot jump!” Not to mention the hundreds of feet below that.

  “We’ve got to get aboard—would you rather fly and I’ll jump first?”

  Not especially, but before I could answer, the Highwhale quickly gained twenty feet and veered to port—right into us.

  Speer barely dodged the collision. “Evidently, we’ve been seen,” he said.

  “Guess the rockets tipped them off, huh?”

  Speer brought us back into position, this time only about eight feet over the catwalk. “Can you do this?”

  No, I thought, but I undid my seat harness anyway. Three quick breaths, and then I jumped—and landed hard on the catwalk, grabbing the rail so tightly my fingernails cut into my palms.

  I could only see in tunnel vision, a blessing considering the vistas all around me. The only thing I was aware of was the rope in my hands. I quickly tied it with a Boy Scout knot my father taught me a million summer vacations ago.

  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.”

  I knew I should defend my gender. It was another disgusting comment that should be roundly contradicted.

  Yet somehow I didn’t have the heart. Bodies and blood were everywhere. It was horrible. But we’d won. Killed the bad guy, while spitting in Death’s face. Adrenaline washed over me, and I felt alive—more alive than I’d ever felt before.

  Feeling like that, I just didn’t want to worry about what I should think or the appropriate thing to say. It was a strange sensation, letting go of all that. Strange, but not bad.

  And it felt good to be around someone so confident. Speer still looked stylishly disheveled.

  Looking through the control room door, I could see clear into the mess room. There were some couches there.

  “Um . . . with lateral control out, how are we going to get down?” I asked.

  Speer remained at the helm. “Not to worry—we’ll bleed hydrogen from the gasbag.”

  “Well, no hurry.” I eased up close to him. “You know, if this were the end of an American action movie, the hero and heroine would probably have wild sex on one of those couches,” I said suggestively. Our bodies almost touched.

  “And if it was a Steam Pointe novel’s conclusion,” he replied, “our hero would politely let the foreigner know he’s only interested in ladies, not women that have probably been passed around by more men than pocket change.”