Ilse Witch (7 page)

A few taunting remarks were tossed at him from behind the anonymity of metal-clad hulls, but he ignored them. No one would make those same remarks to his face. Not these days. Not since he had killed the last man who’d dared to do so.

The sleeker, trimmer Rover airships came into view as he neared the far end of the field.
Black Moclips
sat foremost,
polished wood-and-metal hull gleaming in the sunlight. She was the best ship he had ever flown, a cruiser built for battle, quick and responsive to the tack of her ambient-light sails and the tightening and loosening of her radian draws. Just a shade under 110 feet long and 35 feet wide, she resembled a big black ray. Her low, flat fighting cabin sat amidships on a decking braced by cross beams and warded by twin pontoons curved into battering rams fore and aft. Twin sets of diapson crystals converted to raw energy the light funneled from the collector sails through the radian draws. Parse tubes expelled the converted energy to propel the ship. The bridge sat aft with the pilot box front and center on the decking, its controls carefully shielded from harm. Three masts flew the ambient-light sails, one each fore, aft, and center. The sails themselves were strangely shaped, broad and straight at the lower end, where they were fastened to the booms, but curved where spars drew them high above to a triangle’s point. The design allowed for minimal slack in a retack and minimal drag from the wind. Speed and power kept you alive in the air, and both were measured in seconds.

Furl Hawken came racing down the field from the ship, long blond beard whipping from side to side. “We’re ready to lift off, Captain,” he shouted, slowing as he reached Alt Mer and swung into step beside him. “Got a good day for it, don’t we?”

“Smooth sailing ahead.” Redden Alt Mer put his hand on his Second Officer’s broad shoulder. “Any sign of Little Red?”

Furl Hawken’s mouth worked on whatever it was he was chewing, his eyes cast down. “Sick in bed, Captain. Flu, maybe. You know her. She’d come if she was able.”

“I know you’re the worst liar for a hundred miles in any direction. She’s in a tavern somewhere, or worse.”

The big man looked hurt. “Well, maybe that’s so, but you’d better let it pass for now, ’cause we got a more immediate problem.” He shook his head. “Like we don’t have one
every time we turn around these days. Like every single oink doesn’t come from the same pig’s house.”

“Ah, our friends in Federation Command?”

“A full line Commander is aboard for the flight with two of his flunkies. Observation purposes, he tells me. Reconnaissance. A day in the skies. Shades! I nod and smile like a sailor’s wife at news of his plans to give up sailing.”

Redden Alt Mer nodded absently. “Best thing to do with these people, Hawk.”

They had reached
Black Moclips
, and he swung onto the rope ladder and climbed to the bridge where the Federation Commander and his adjutants were waiting.

“Commander,” he greeted pleasantly. “Welcome aboard.”

“My compliments, Captain Alt Mer,” the other replied. He did not offer his own name, which told the Rover something right away about how he viewed their relationship. He was a thin, pinch-faced man with sallow skin. If he’d spent a day on the line in the last twelve months, it would come as a surprise to the Rover. “Are we ready to go?”

“Ready and able, Commander.”

“Your First Officer?”

“Indisposed.” Or she would wish as much once he got his hands on her. “Mr. Hawken can take up the slack. Gentlemen, is this your first time in the air?”

The look that passed between the adjutants gave him his answer.

“It is our first,” the Commander confirmed with a dismissive shrug. “Your job is to make the experience educational. Ours is to learn whatever it is you have to teach.”

“Run ’em up, Hawk.” He gestured his Second Officer forward to oversee lofting the sails. “We’ll be seeing action today, Commander,” he cautioned. “It could get a little rough.”

The Commander smiled condescendingly. “We’re soldiers, Captain. We’ll be fine.”

Pompous fathead, Alt Mer thought. You’ll be fine if I keep you that way and not otherwise.

He watched his Rover crew scramble up the masts, lofting the sails and fastening the radian draws in place. Airships were marvelous things, but operating them required a mindset that was sorely lacking in most Federation soldiers. The Southlanders were fine on solid ground executing infantry tactics. They were comfortable with throwing bodies into breaches, like sandbags, and relying on the sheer weight of their numbers to crush an enemy. But put them in the air and they couldn’t seem to decide what to do next. Their intuition vanished. Everything they knew about warfare dried up and blew away with the first breath of wind to fill the sails.

Rovers, on the other hand, were born to the life. It was in their blood, in their history, and in the way they had lived their lives for two thousand years. Rovers did not respond well to regimentation and drill. They responded to freedom. Flying the big airships gave them that. Migratory by nature and tradition, they were always on the move anyway. Staying put was unthinkable. The Federation was still trying to figure that out, and they were constantly sending observers aloft with the Rover crews to discover what it was their mercenaries knew that they didn’t.

Trouble was, it wasn’t something that could be taught. The Bordermen who fought for the Free-born weren’t any better. Or the Dwarves. Only the Elves seemed to have mastered sailing the wind currents with the same ease as the Rovers.

One day, that would change. Airships were still new to the Four Lands. The first had been built and flown barely two dozen years earlier. They had been in service as fighting vessels for less than five years. Only a handful of shipwrights understood the mechanics of ambient-light sails, radian draws, and diapson crystals well enough to build the vessels that could utilize them. Using light as energy was an old dream, only occasionally realized, as in the case of airships. It was one thing to build them, another to make them fly. It took skill and intelligence and instinct to keep them in the air.
More were lost through poor navigation, loss of control, and panic than through damage from battle.

Rovers had sailed the seas in trading ships and pirate vessels longer than anyone had, and the jump to airships was easier for them. As mercenaries, they were invaluable to the Federation. But the Southlanders continued to believe that if they could just learn how the Rovers managed to make it all look so easy, they wouldn’t need them as Captains and crews.

Hence, his passengers, three more in a long line of Federation hopefuls.

Resigned, he sighed. There was nothing he could do about it. Hawk would fuss enough for the both of them. He took his station in the pilot box, watching his men as they finished tying down the draws and securing the sails. Other ships were preparing to lift off, as well, their crews performing similar tasks in preparation. On the airfield, ground crews were preparing to release the mooring lines.

The old, familiar excitement was humming in his blood, and the clarity of his vision sharpened.

“Unhood the crystals, Hawk!” he shouted to his Second Officer.

Furl Hawken relayed the instructions to the men stationed at the front and rear parse tubes, where the crystals were fed light from the radian draws. Unhooding freed the mechanisms that allowed Alt Mer to fly the ship. Canvas coverings and linchpins securing the metal hoods that shielded the crystals were released, giving control over the vessel to the pilot box.

Alt Mer tested the levers, drawing down power from the sails in small increments.
Black Moclips
strained against her tethers in response, shifting slightly as light converted to energy was expelled through the parse tubes.

“Cast off!” he ordered.

The ground crew freed the restraining lines, and
Black Moclips
lifted away in a smooth, upward swing. Alt Mer spun the wheel that guided the rudders off the parse tubes and fed
power down the radian draws to the crystals in steadily increasing increments. Behind him, he heard the hurried shift of the Federation officers toward pieces of decking they could hold on to.

“There are securing lines and harnesses coiled on those railing stays,” he called back to them. “Fasten one about your waist, just in case it gets bumpy.”

He didn’t bother checking to see if they did as he suggested. If they didn’t, it was their own skins they risked.

In moments, they were flying out over the flats of the Prekkendorran, several hundred feet in the air,
Black Moclips
in the lead, another seven ships following in loose formation. Airships could fly comfortably at more than a thousand feet, but he preferred to stay down where the winds were less severe. He watched the twin rams slice through the air to either side of the decking, black horns curving upward against the green of the earth. Low and flat,
Black Moclips
had the look of a hawk at hunt, soaring smooth and silent against the midday sky.

Wind filled the sails, and the Rover crew moved quickly to take advantage of the additional power. Alt Mer hooded the diapson crystals in response, slowing the power fed by the radian draws, giving the ship over to the wind. Furl Hawken was shouting out instructions, exhorting in that big, booming voice, keeping everyone moving smoothly from station to station. Accustomed to the movements of a ship in flight, the crew wore no restraining lines. That would change when they engaged in battle.

Alt Mer risked a quick glance over his shoulder at the Federation officers—risked, because if he started laughing at what he found, he would find himself in trouble he didn’t need. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. The Commander and his adjutants were gripping the rail with white-knuckled determination, but no one was sick yet and no one was hiding his eyes. The Rover gave them a reassuring wave and dismissed them from his thoughts.

When
Black Moclips
was well away from the Federation camp and approaching the forward lines of the Free-born, he gave the order to unlock the ship’s weapons.
Black Moclips
carried several sets, all of them carefully stacked and stored amidships. Bows and arrows and slings and javelins were used mostly for long-range attacks against opposing crews and fighters. Spears and blades were used in close combat. Long, jagged-edge pikes and grappling hooks attached to throwing ropes were used to draw an enemy ship close enough to tear apart her sails or sever her radian draws.

The two dozen Federation soldiers who rode belowdecks during embarkation climbed up the ladder through the hatchway amidships and moved to arm themselves. Some took up positions behind shielding at the rails. Some moved to man the catapults that launched buckets of metal shards or burning balls of pitch. All were veterans of countless airship battles aboard
Black Moclips
. Alt Mer and his crew of Rovers left the fighting to them. Their responsibility was to the ship. It took all of their concentration to hold her steady in the heat of battle, to position her so that the soldiers could bring their weapons to bear, and to employ her when necessary as a battering ram. The crew was not expected to fight unless the ship was in danger of being boarded.

Watching the soldiers take up their weapons and move eagerly into position, the Rover Captain was struck by the amount of energy men could summon for the purpose of killing one another.

Furl Hawken appeared suddenly at his side. “Everything’s at the ready, Captain. Crew, weapons, and ship.” He shifted his eyes sideways. “How’s our stouthearted passengers holding up?”

Alt Mer glanced briefly over his shoulder. One adjutant had freed himself from his safety line and had buried his head in the slop bucket. The other, white faced, was grimly forcing himself not to look over at his companion. The pinch-faced
Commander was scribbling in a notebook, his black-clad body wedged into a corner of the decking.

“They’d prefer it if we just stayed on the ground, I think,” he offered mildly.

“Wonder if they’ve got anything to report regarding the functions of their insides?” Hawk chuckled and moved away.

Black Moclips
passed over the Free-born lines headed toward their airfields, the other seven airships spread out to either side. Two were Rover ships, the other five Federation. He knew their Captains. Both Rover Captains and one of the Federation Captains were reliable and skilled. The rest were marking time until one mistake or another caught up with them. Redden Alt Mer’s approach to the situation was to try to keep out of their way.

Ahead, Free-born airships were lifting off to meet them. The Rover Captain produced his spyglass and studied the markings. Ten, eleven, twelve—he counted them as they rose, one after the other. Five were Elven, the rest Free-born. Not the kind of odds he liked. Ostensibly, he was to engage and destroy any enemy airships he encountered, without sustaining damage to his own. As if doing so could possibly make a difference in the outcome of the war. He brushed the thought aside. He would engage the Elven airships and let the others bang up against themselves.

“Safety lines in place, gentlemen!” he called to his Federation passengers and crew, gripping the controls as the enemy ships drew near.

At two hundred yards and with an airspeed approaching twenty knots, he sideslipped
Black Moclips
out of formation and dipped sharply toward the ground. Leveling out again, then increasing his speed, he brought the airship out of her dive and into a climb beneath the Free-born. As he sailed upward on their lee side, his catapults began launching scrap metal and fireballs into the exposed hulls and sails. One ship exploded into flame and began drifting away. A second responded to the attack by launching its own catapults. Jagged
bits of metal screamed overhead as Alt Mer spun the wheel sharply to carry
Black Moclips
out of the line of fire.

In seconds, all the airships were engaged in battle, and on the ground, the men of the opposing armies paused to look skyward. Back and forth the warring vessels glided, rising and falling in sudden tackings, fireballs cutting bright red paths across the blue, metal shards and arrows whistling through their deadly trajectories. Two of the Federation ships collided and went down in a twisted, locked heap, steering gone, hoods shattered, crystals drawing down so much power they exploded in midair. Another of the ships spun away from an encounter in a maneuver that lacked explanation and suggested panic. A Free-born vessel skidded into a Rover ship with a sharp screech of metal plates. Radian draws snapped loudly, sending both into slides that carried them away from each other. Everywhere, men were shouting and screaming in anger and fear and pain.