And they were gone. Every nerve on the skymaster, human and Twav, was afire. The silence was immense. My Turkic is functional but necessary—enough to know what Ferid Bey is actually saying—and I recalled the few words of the skycaptain I had overheard as he relayed communications to the crew. The assault on Camp Oudeman had been part of a surprise offensive by the Tharsian Warqueens. Massive assaults had broken out along a five-hundred-mile front from Arsai to Urania. War machines, shock troops—there had even been an assault on Spacefleet: squadron after squadron of rockets launched to draw the staggering firepower of our orbital battleships from the assault below. And up from out of the soil, things like nothing that anyone had ever seen before. Things that put whole battalions to flight, that smashed apart trench lines and crumbled redoubts to sand. As I tried to imagine the red earth parting and something from beyond nightmares rising up, I could not elude the dark thought: might there not be similar terrible novelties in the sky? This part of my eavesdropping I kept to myself. It was most simple: I had been routinely lying to Count Jack since the first day I set up my music on the piano.
“I could murder a drink,” Count Jack said. “If there were such a thing on this barquadero. Even a waft of a Jameson cork under my nose.”
The champagne on the deck of the Empress of Mars must have corrupted me, because at that moment I would gladly have joined the Maestro. More than joined, I would have beaten him by a furlong to the bottom of the bottle of Jameson.
Up on the bridge, a glass finger projecting from the skymaster’s lifting body, the skycaptain called orders from his post at the steering yoke. Crew moved around us. The battledores shifted the hue of their plumage from blue to violent yellow. I felt the decking shift beneath me—how disorienting, how unpleasant, this sense of everything sound and trustworthy moving, nothing to hold on to. The engines were loud; the captain must be putting on speed, navigating between the wind-polished stone. We were flying through a monstrous stone pipe organ. I glanced up along the companionway to the bridge. Pink suffused the world beyond the glass. We had run all night through the Labyrinth of Night, that chartless maze of canyons and ravines and rock arches that humans suspected was not entirely natural. I saw rock walls above me. We were low, hugging the silty channels and canals. The rising sun sent planes of light down the sheer, fluted, stone walls. There is nothing on Earth to compare with the loveliness of dawn on Mars, but how I wish I were there and not in this dreadful place.
“Faisal.”
“Maestro.”
“When we get back, remind me to fire that greased turd, Ferid.”
I smiled, and Count Jack Fitzgerald began to sing. “Galway Bay,” the most hackneyed and sentimental of faux-Irish paddywhackery (“Have you ever been to Galway Bay? Incest and Gaelic games. All they know, all they like”), but I had never heard him sing it like this. Had he not been seated on the deck before me, leaning up against a bulkhead, I would have doubted that it was his voice. It was small but resonant, perfect like porcelain, sweet as a rose and filled with a high, light innocence. This was the voice of childhood, the boy singing back the tunes his grandmother taught him. This was the Country Count from Kildare. Every soul on the skymaster, Terrene and Martian, listened, but he did not sing for them. He needed no audience, no accompanist: this was a command performance for one.
The skymaster shook to a sustained impact. The spell was broken. Voices called out in Turkic and Twav flute-speech. The skymaster rocked, as if shaken in a God-like grip. Then, with a shriek of rending metal and ship skin, the gun-blister directly above us was torn away—gunner, gun, and a two-meter shard of hull. A face looked in at us. A face that more than filled the gash in the hull, a nightmare of six eyes arranged around a trifurcate beak. The beak opened. Rows of grinding teeth moved within. A cry blasted us with alien stench: ululating over three octaves, ending in a shriek. It drove the breath from our lungs and the will from our hearts. Another answered it, from all around us. Then the face was gone. A moment of shock—a moment, that was all—and the skycaptain shouted orders. The Twav rose from their perches, wings clattering, and streamed through the hole in the hull. I heard the whine of ray rifles warming up, then the louder crackle and sizzle of our own defensive heat rays.
I thought that I would never hear a worse thing than the cry through the violated hull. The shriek, out there, unseen, was like the cry I might make if my spine were torn from my living body. I could only guess: one of those things had met a heat ray.
We never saw any of the battledores again.
Again, the skymaster shook to an impact. Count Jack lunged forward as claws stabbed through the hull and tore three rips the entire length of the bulkhead. The skymaster lurched to one side; we slid across the decking in our tailcoats and smoke-smudged dickey shirts. An impact jolted the rear of the airship, I glimpsed blackness, then the entire tail turret was gone and the rear of the Skymaster was open to the air. Through the open space I saw a four-winged flying thing stroke away from us, up through the pink stone arches of this endless labyrinth. It was enormous. I am no judge of comparative dimensions—I am an auditory man, not a visual one—but it was on a par with our own limping skymaster. The creature part furled its wings to clear the arch, then turned high against the red sky, and I saw glitters of silver at the nape of its neck and between its legs. Mechanisms, devices, Uliri crew.
While I gaped at the sheer impossible horror of what I beheld, the skymaster was struck again, an impact so hard it flung us from one side of the hold to the other. I saw steel-shod claws the size of scimitars pierce the glass finger of the bridge like the skin of a ripe orange. The winged Martian horror ripped bridge from hull, and, with a flick of its foot—it held the bridge as lightly and easily as a pencil—hurled it spinning through the air. I saw one figure fall from it and closed my eyes. I did hear Count Jack mumble the incantations of his faith.
Robbed of control, the skymaster yawed wildly. Engineering crew rushed around us, shouting tersely to one another, fighting to regain control, to bring us down in some survivable landing. There was no hope of escape now. What were those things? Those nightmare hunters of the Labyrinth of Night? Skin shredded, struts shrieked and buckled as the skymaster grazed a rock chimney. We listed and started to spin.
“We’ve lost port-side engines!” I shouted, translating the engineers’ increasingly cold and desperate exchanges. We were going down, but it was too fast … too fast. The chief engineer yelled an order that translated as “Brace for impact” in any language. I wrapped cargo strapping around my arms and gripped for all my worth. Pianists have strong fingers.
“Patrick and Mary!” Count Jack cried, and we hit. The impact was so huge, so hard, that it drove all breath and intelligence and thought from me, everything except that death was certain and that the last, the very last, thing I would ever see would be a drop of fear drool on the plump bottom lip of Count Jack Fitzgerald, and that I had never noticed how full, how kissable, those lips were. Death is such a sweet surrender.
We did not die. We bounced. We hit harder. The skymaster’s skeleton groaned and snapped. Sparking wires fell around us. Still we did not stop, or die. I remember thinking, don’t tumble, if we tumble, we are dead, all of us, and so I knew we would survive. Shaken, smashed, stunned, but surviving. The corpse of the skymaster slid to a crunching stop hard against the house-sized boulders at the foot of the canyon wall. I could see daylight in five places through the skymaster’s violated hull. It was beautiful beyond words. The sky horrors might still be circling, but I had to get out of the airship.