Faye hooked her legs around the rail so she could lean way over. The glass went clear past the catwalk and on down so she could see directly below. Even though she was mostly all bundled up, she really didn’t want to get her forehead stuck to the freezing glass. That would have been embarrassing.
She couldn’t even see the Imperium ships below, but when she checked with her head map, she could pick them out. Engines pumping, magic surging, thousands of soldiers looking for a chance to shoot them down. She knew that they’d already tried, and she could sense the friction and the hot bits of matter as projectiles were futilely lobbed in their direction. There was no use distressing the Marauders with this information, she figured, since the odds of them actually getting hit were about two thousand, five hundred to one. They were a tiny, nearly invisible spot in the sky to the Imperium airships and fighters. Of course, those odds would change the higher the bad guys climbed and the more lead they threw.
Captain Southunder was biting one knuckle. “Engines?”
“Still functioning,” answered one of the crew. The board in front of him had nothing but green lights on it.
“Pressure compensators?”
Faye looked over. That board had several lights flashing yellow and one that was red. “Fifty percent, Captain.” The pirate thumped the panel with his fist a few times and the red one turned yellow. Now that was engineering that Faye could understand. “Back up to seventy.” The light went red. “Hell. Fifty.”
She didn’t know what was going on, except there wasn’t any air up here at all, it was freezing, stuff was starting to break, and if certain specific things broke on the machine that was pumping in heated air, they’d all pass out and choke to death or have their blood boil off before they even had a chance to fall to their deaths. Her head map was feeding her information that even the Captain didn’t know. Barns was Lucky, and he was using his Power hard. The tremble in his hands and the sweat on his face wasn’t from flying the ship, it was from the physical stress of unconsciously burning his Power to manipulate probability in their favor. He was better at it than he knew, and Faye got a little mad at herself when she realized how jealous she was of that particular Power, and just how much better she would be able to put it to use. Meanwhile, a few things had snapped from the cold and the stress deep inside the ship. There had been a spark, and it had immediately ignited the fuel in a machine, but Lady Origami had forced the fire out from here merely by getting stern with the unruly fire.
Faye was impressed. She wondered if the Captain realized just how many times those two Actives had saved his ship. Probably not, since he was so distracted. The man who could control weather was probably feeling extra uncomfortable, since for the first time in his long life, he was in a place that didn’t have weather as he knew it. He was trying not to show it, but Faye could tell. The energy and currents that existed up here for him to manipulate were too alien for him to understand. Poor Captain Southunder.
In the hold, the genius Cogs were using their magic to make sure Buckminster Fuller’s contraption was going to work, and she could see how they were folding and unfolding bits of the Power to grant themselves flashes of extra wisdom. That type of magic was starting to make more sense to her, and, in fact, it even seemed familiar for some reason. Not too far away from them was Mr. Sullivan, all suited up in steel, his body made extra dense to keep out the cold. He was impervious as stone, waiting, thinking… About what, she didn’t know, but heaven help anybody who got in Mr. Sullivan’s way after he’d had a chance to think through how to get them.
Now the Captain was addressing her, so Faye had to pull out of her head map and snap back to reality. “Faye, can you reach the Imperium target from here?”
“Yes, Captain,” she answered with what surely seemed like no hesitation to everyone else. In reality, she’d had to think it over hard, for nearly one-eighth of a second. She’d be falling through the air, carrying a thousand pounds of steel and Mr. Sullivan, but even then she’d be able to Travel up to forty times to correct her trajectory and get them in the right place before she built up too much speed and hit the ground and went splat. Once again, it wasn’t the distance, but the view, and if you were going four hundred miles an hour, it sure made landing challenging. “No problem.”
“Seventy thousand, five hundred feet,” Barns said.
“Grab Mr. Sullivan and get down there. The hold will depressurize the second we open the doors, and it won’t do to have you two get sucked outside.”
“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Captain.”
Something was wrong. Faye tilted her head to the side, like her head map had just made her inner ear feel off balance. Barns had stiffened too, as his Power had just recoiled against something that even he couldn’t help shift the odds on. She checked her head map. One of the Imperium navy ships far below them felt different from the others swarming around it. It was bigger, faster. Moving quickly across the ocean, and the magic that was gathering inside of it was deadly and familiar. “Peace Ray charging up!” Faye warned. Now that was something that would be a whole lot more effective than the explosive shells the Imperium had been lobbing up at them. A Tesla beam could shoot clear out into space if it felt like it.
“Barns, evasive maneuvers.” Southunder ordered.
But Faye knew that would be next to useless. The ray would travel in a perfectly straight line seemingly as fast as the light from the sun. Their altitude was protecting them from everything else in the sky, but that same altitude would just make them a better target for the Peace Ray. They might miss a few times, maybe, but that was it. The Imperium certainly weren’t stupid. Faye had already done the math. “Keep going, Captain. I got this.” She didn’t wait for the inevitable response.
There was a scary white skull face looking down at her with big black eyes in the cargo hold. Mr. Sullivan’s voice seemed odd coming through all that steel plate. “It time?”
She reached down and picked up the bundle of guns and bombs she’d left here. There were a bunch of pistols already holstered on her body. Behind her, the Cogs had fired up their new machine, and it was crackling with magical energy. “Can’t. Peace Ray incoming. Gotta stop it.”
Sullivan may have seemed slow to most folks, but he was anything but, especially when it came down to matters pertaining to them not getting dead. “I’ll catch up.”
Faye checked her head map, picked a spot nearly sixteen miles away, and set off to absolutely wreck a battleship all by herself.
Imperium Warship K3 Auspicious Dragon
Faye quickly realized that the main reason the massive airship hadn’t fired its Peace Ray at the Traveler yet was because the designers hadn’t ever thought they’d ever have to fire it nearly straight up.
She had to hand it to whoever the captain of the Japanese battleship was, because he’d pumped hydrogen forward and swiveled the engines so that the front end of the ship was rising hard and fast. She’d never set foot in an airship which was pointed at this steep of an angle before—well, except for the Tempest while it was crashing, but she’d been in a coma for that. Normally when an airship climbed it was a sort of floating with just a bit of an upward angle inside. They were actually pretty gentle. This, on the other hand, felt rather extreme, and if she’d been anybody other than Sally Faye Vierra, landing on a catwalk at such a sharp angle would have been disconcerting.
To Faye, it merely threw her aim off a bit. Her first bullet hit the Japanese soldier in the shoulder, but that was the beauty of the Suomi Gun. She’d only picked the Finnish gun out of the locker because it had had the prettiest wooden stock, but it was really easy to shoot, so she just adjusted her aim and put the next few in the center of his chest. In her defense, she’d been holding the heavy gun in one hand, and her other hand had been holding the handles on her big sack of guns, which weighed a ton. She dropped the sack with a clatter and used her other hand to grab the magazine.