The Torches on the damage-control team were easy to pick out. They were the ones not coming to kill her. They were concentrating on the explosion, trying to keep the fire in check while the other armored cells sealed themselves off. Everybody else was charging at her, but you can’t hardly tackle a Traveler. Faye simply dropped the empty bazooka, stepped through space, and let all those tough guys dogpile each other. Then she lifted her .45, shot one Torch in the throat, turned and shot the other right between the shoulder blades. Then she Traveled back to her bag of guns, because the oncoming wall of fire would take care of the rest.
An alarm began to sound. Why had it taken them so darn long? But then she realized that she’d only been aboard for one minute and fifteen seconds. She could sense the Peace Ray recharging, but the ship was listing a bit to the side. She’d certainly upset their aim, but they could still get themselves corrected, and that simply wouldn’t do. She had to take this big battleship down. There would be other Torches on a ship this big, and they’d all be concentrating on controlling the fires she had started, which meant it was time to switch tactics. She had to find other things to blow up.
She went back to her bag and pulled out the two really big Russian stick grenades. She could barely lift them and couldn’t imagine how some poor sucker was expected to throw these further than the blast radius. Lance had said these things could blow up a tank!
Her boots landed on a narrow catwalk. She was out in the open. The blue ocean was visible through the grating. The hangar was filled with biplanes. They were suspended by hooks and chains, dangling over the open floor. Airplanes were filled with gas, but more importantly, they could be loaded with bombs, and if she was a bomb, where would she be kept?
There.
There was a big armored door in the side of the hangar. The bombs were fed down a mechanized chute. She followed the chute up with her head map… And landed in an armored room absolutely filled with deadly steel ovals, thousands of them, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. Faye grinned. This was perfect. The armor was supposed to keep explosions out, but it was going to have a heck of a time holding this one in… She struggled to pull the massive cotter pin out of the Russian grenade, but she managed. Then she dropped it and hurried out of there. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it went off.
She landed on the far end of the ship, and good thing she did, because the bottom middle section came apart five seconds later. Not counting Tesla devices, it was the biggest explosion Faye had ever seen. Debris, people, even whole airplanes got launched out by the blast and went spinning toward the ocean. Her head map told her it was actually hundreds of smaller blasts all piled on top of each other, but nobody else would be able to tell that.
The bottom hull’s hydrogen was burning. The explosion must have killed several of their damage-control Torches, because they weren’t doing nearly as good a job stopping this fire.
Somebody must have had the good sense to try to steer this thing. Faye had to hand it to the Imperium Navy, they were very steady under pressure. They’d realized they were crashing, and they were going to try and put it down soft. Faye didn’t think so. Her head map told her which engines were being used to power the compressors on the remaining bags which would enable them to control their descent, and she still had one of the big stick grenades left.
This room was filled with roaring turbines, big as trucks, and pumping pistons as big around as trees. The alarm was blaring. The lights were flashing. Men were scrambling. They’d all been rocked by the big explosion and they were scared.
Faye grabbed hold of the pin, but it didn’t want to budge. She pulled, straining, hard as she could. The darn thing was stuck.
There was an Iron Guard in this room. A big, terrifying man, and Faye could sense the magic roiling off of him. He was moving quickly, bounding between the machines. She could tell what he was because he had made himself so very light. He was a Heavy, like Mr. Sullivan. And he’d been pursuing her futilely through the ship. She could respect the effort, but she wasn’t planning on sticking around.
The grenade’s pin wouldn’t come out. As long as this Kaga was in the air, then the Traveler was in danger. Faye tugged and pulled, but the pin was stuck, and she had cow-milking hands, so it wasn’t like she was weak. Stupid Soviet junk!
Gravity intensified. She could feel it building on top of her. The Heavy was hurling Imperium engineers out of his way. He drew his sword. Her head map screamed as the weight of ten worlds tried to squish her flat.
This stupid bomb was stuck and she wasn’t strong enough to free it. Her body wasn’t strong enough to shrug off all the extra gravity, and in a couple of seconds, some of her internal organs were going to pop. She needed to be stronger.
The Heavy roared a battle cry and threw himself at her.
She’d met the Chairman briefly. She’d seen how he’d changed his Powers back and forth, tapping whatever part of the Power he needed to. Faye hadn’t understood it then, heck, she barely understood it now, but the Power wasn’t that much different than Lady Origami’s folded animals. Every type of magic had a shape, and that shape touched other shapes, and all those shapes together made up the world. Your type of magic just determined which part of the world you could tweak. If you reshaped your own connection, you could steer it to a different part of the Power and call on a whole new form of magic.
She’d changed this before, instinctually calling on Whisper’s fire magic while inside the belly of the God of Demons. Faye felt for the connection to the Power she’d just stolen from the Brute on the bridge, found it, studied the complex geometry…
And in the half a second it took for the Heavy to cover the distance, Faye figured out how to make herself strong.
Faye easily shrugged off all of the extra gravity like it wasn’t even there. The pin came right out of the grenade. The Heavy’s sword was coming right for her head, but it seemed so slow. Faye simply moved her body out of the way.
The grenade and the Heavy hit the floor at the same time. So this must be how Delilah felt. The Heavy swung the sword at her ankles, but she just hopped over it like she was playing jump rope. She kicked him in the ribs, and the big man flew back and crashed hard into a pylon. That big old razor sword could come in handy. She crossed the distance in a blur, reached down, grabbed him by the arm, not even that hard, mind you, and his bones snapped like brittle twigs. Faye had surprised herself. The Heavy bellowed.
Fun as that was, that big Russian grenade was about to go off, so Faye focused, realized that she couldn’t Travel because she was currently a Brute, let her Power spring back to its comfortable state, and stepped outside.
She was whistling through the sky. The Pacific Ocean was bright blue and pretty. It was a beautiful day.
Faye realized she still had the Heavy by the arm. He began screaming his head off as he realized where they were, so Faye just let go of him and he went flailing off to the side. That fancy Iron Guard sword of his was flipping through the air, so Faye timed it just right, reached out, and snagged it by the handle. From what she’d seen, those things were so darned sharp that if she’d missed she probably would’ve left fingers behind.
As she fell toward Earth, another giant explosion rocked the battleship. Her grenade had ignited something else vital. The entire left side of the ship came apart. The bags were consumed in three rapid fireballs, and then the entire sky above her was one big spreading cloud of red and black as one of the most advanced warships in history was blown to kingdom come. Hundreds died instantly and a thousand more would ride the flaming wreckage into the ocean.