The fermentation gas wasn’t as light as the lift gas from Lake Dako on Mount Kiji, which necessitated design changes. The ships had to be made bigger to achieve the same lift capacities, and the materials used had to be lighter and the crew reduced. In underground caverns and basement workshops, the dedicated warriors and builders of Marshal Mazoti’s volunteer corps toiled to bend and shape bamboo into hoops, struts, and girders, and to sew gasbags from varnished silk.
To reduce weight, the shipwrights reduced the number of internal supports for the bamboo frame, leaving as much space for the gasbags as possible. Some of the bamboo hoops and struts were reinforced with steel as the combination of materials provided more strength than either alone.
To make the most of the weaker lift gas, Atharo Ye designed the airships to have a flattened profile so that they resembled two saucers stacked face-to-face, or the body of a manta ray, rather than the traditional egg-shaped oblong. Although the new hull design was bulkier and less maneuverable, it also generated lift with forward motion, which helped the airships to stay aloft. As rowers sitting at the rim of the flattened hull wielded their massive feathered oars, the semirigid airships pulsated forward like jellyfish swimming through an empyrean sea.
The new Imperial ships were thus structurally weaker than their predecessors and could not weather the unpredictable conditions of long cruises as well; the marshal compensated by disguising the airships under a light covering of sand on the beach, as close to the scene of combat as possible.
The gondolas of the new airships were also shaped oddly. Instead of the sleek, sailing-ship-like profiles of the past, the new gondolas were oval in shape and far bigger, taking up almost a quarter of the bottom surface of the billowing hull and embedding a sizable portion inside the hull as well. Weight reduction was achieved by constructing most of the gondola, except the structural elements, with wicker. The crews had to be as light as possible, too, which meant once again that they were almost all women, mainly veterans of Dara’s old air force and women’s auxiliaries.
But as the gondolas were so light in comparison to the rest of the hull, the flight characteristics of the airships were somewhat unstable. To compensate for this, each of the airships was also equipped with a heavy ballast ball just aft of the gondolas, a large ceramic sphere suspended below the hull like a gigantic, dangling dewdrop hanging from the belly of a grasshopper.
The design seemed strangely inefficient to the shipbuilders—many of them former engineers who had retired to the Big Island to enjoy their golden years after a lifetime of service at Mount Kiji Air Base—but they reasoned that this was perhaps the best Atharo Ye could do given the constrained time frame for modifying the traditional airship design to work with a new lift gas.
The greatest weakness of the fermentation-gas-powered airships, of course, was the flammability of their lift gas. If any of the gasbags sprang a leak, even a spark would cause the entire ship to turn into a fiery bubble. There was not much the marshal could do to reduce the risk, however, as any additional armor for the ship would have increased its weight beyond the power of the weak lift gas. She had to rely on the fortunate happenstance that the Lyucu had not adopted the use of archers, especially not with fire arrows.
For the same reason, the marshal had to eschew equipping the airships with flamethrowers; instead, Mazoti would have to rely on other surprises.
Though the song that the crew of the marshal’s flagship, Silkmotic Arrow, chanted in unison began in the efforts of silk makers to relieve the tedium of long days in the workshops, the wheels the women now spun in the airship generated not threads or yarn, but power, power that would be stored until it was needed.
Hinged doors at the front of the gondolas dropped open as the airships readied themselves in battle configuration.
Oddly, the six airships were not all flying at the same height. Rather, four of the airships—Spirit of Kiji, Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins, all commanded by trusted captains from the old all-women Dasu air force under Gin Mazoti—hovered in the same plane to form a diamond parallel to the ground. Silkmotic Arrow flew above the diamond while Moji’s Vengeance, commanded by Zomi Kidosu, flew below it.
Silk screens inside the gondolas hid most of the crews of the airships as well as the machinery they operated. Only about six women on each ship were visible from the open door at the front, holding longbows with nocked arrows.
The airships approached the Lyucu fleet as garinafins took off from the city-ships, rising to meet this unexpected challenge. Below them, Lyucu warriors scrambled around a golden canopy on the deck of the pékyu’s flagship, Pride of Ukyu.
“That canopy must be where the pékyu is seated,” said Marshal Mazoti. “Target it.” In truth, she doubted that the crafty Pékyu Tenryo would be so foolish as to make himself such an obvious target. But striking the golden canopy, whatever it was hiding, would certainly enhance the morale of the Dara forces.
Dafiro Miro, who was serving as the marshal’s executive officer, gave a series of quick orders to the rowers to maneuver Silkmotic Arrow slightly forward of the formation, and the archers at the front of the airship pointed the tips of their arrows at the distant golden canopy below.
The Lyucu warriors on the decks below jeered as they saw the few archers crouched at the opening at the front of the airship gondolas. Did the barbarians of Dara really think they would defeat the garinafins and city-ships with a few archers?
“Men of Dara,” the pékyu’s voice boomed from a bone trumpet installed at the top of the main mast. He was speaking from somewhere deep in the ship’s hold, safely hidden from the surface. “Stand down! This is the order of your old emperor!”
As a stunned Marshal Mazoti and the rest of her crew watched, the golden canopy was whipped away to reveal a bed on which lay Kuni Garu, the Emperor of Dara.
Kuni wasn’t moving.
Two of the Lyucu warriors stepped forward and lifted him from the bed, and he groaned as he twisted his face away from the light. The crews of the Imperial airships gasped.
Kuni had kept the injury in his toe hidden from the guards until it had become infected. By the time his rotting wound was finally discovered, the only option was an amputation of his gangrenous foot. But even after severing the limb, his condition did not seem to improve. The doctors the pékyu sent for declared Kuni to be on the verge of death.
Pékyu Tenryo had wanted to use Kuni as his secret weapon. He had suspected that Empress Jia might stage some last act of resistance, and he had planned to bring out his prized prisoner at the right moment as a way to grind down the morale of Dara’s defenders.