Chapter 9

Despite the protests of those being left behind, the Iron Dove finally left the wreckage a little past midday.  Simon had, in truth, desired to leave earlier than that but, through Abigail’s constant urging, he had attempted to first ascertain the location of the rescue party.  The first few attempts were unsuccessful, to his growing concern.  The radios shouldn’t be having any sort of trouble broadcasting to the incoming ships.  In fact, he was fairly sure he could still reach Walton Harbor on a clear day.  His radioman then informed him that something was blocking the signal.

This wasn’t the kind of news that a mercenary captain sitting, grounded, in the middle of pirate country wanted to hear.  The vast majority of ships taken by pirates were, after all, those that sat on the ground and not those which flew through the clouds.  It was hard to board a flying ship; it was much easier to run up the gangway.  He quickly sent his men out to the high ground so that they could watch for incoming ships while he set others in a perimeter, arming the ship’s weapons as best they could.  Again, he had wanted to lift off right then but Abigail had refused to board the ship.

“We will not be leaving these people to the ravages of pirates again, Mr. Spriggs.”

She had been rather resolute, despite Simon’s arguments, which were actually rather sound.  They had a better chance of beating back any pirate attack in the air, where the ship’s speed and weaponry could be used to its greatest advantage.  This, however, had not fazed her in the slightest.  He had looked to Levi for help, but his old friend had simply shrugged and reminded him that his job was to protect this woman.  At that, Simon had simply thrown back his head, groaned quite audibly, and accepted the woman’s terms.

After a few tense hours of waiting and watching, one of the attack survivors suddenly had an epiphany.  Without telling anyone what was going on, he dashed off in the direction of the wreckage.  Approximately ten minutes later, the jamming static dropped from the lines and the ship was able to send out transmissions once more.  The man returned, a rather proud look plastered upon his face.

“It was the Italian Gold’s radio.  It was broken, sending out white noise.  Mighty powerful radio, that.”

“And you just now thought of that,” Simon asked, irritation obvious in his voice.

“Well I thought it was pirates, same as you.  Lucky I fixed it, huh?”

Simon had simply shaken his head while Levi gave a hardy chuckle.  The radioman was quickly able to get in contact with the rescue party.  They were about a half a day back; they would be there by that evening.  Knowing that they would be rescued soon, Abigail had finally allowed the Iron Dove to leave the site.  Within the hour, the airship was once more rising up into the air and flying through the white, fluffy clouds that yet again graced the skied about Franklin Reach.

After a short time in the air, Levi was finally able to get Hank off by himself to explain the situation properly.

“Hank, how are you holding up?”

“What do you mean, Boss?”

“Well, this trip has been a little more than I had originally anticipated.”  Levi thought back to his words to Fred the day he had decided to come along.  The irony was a little too sweet for his liking.  “We generally don’t throw trainees into harbor assaults and night-time pirate attacks after only a few months.”

“Are you kidding?  This had been fantastic,” Hank said, smiling widely.  The smile very quickly faded and was replaced with a moderately remorseful look as he thought about his words.  “Well, not fantastic, I mean.  It’s not good, all those people dying and whatnot.  I just mean that this is the most action I’ve seen since I took this job and I’m glad for it.  I didn’t sign on to guard warehouses.  I… well, never mind.”

“No, what is it,” Levi asked.  He didn’t really know a lot about Hank, he realized.

“It’s just that, since I was a boy, I thought it would be great to become some sort of, I don’t know… pirate hunter or something.  Like Simon.  The crew’s been telling me about what they really do.  Clever to get them, by the way.”

“They’re a legitimate courier company, I’ll have you know.”

“That brings along their own anti-ship guns.  Yeah.  Look, I know the score here.  This is a dangerous thing we’re doing and people could get hurt.  And I’m not sure why you continue forward, but I’m glad you are.  This is the closest I’m come to actually being useful in a long time.”

Levi thought for a time before speaking.

“Do you want to know why I keep going?”  Hank nodded his head swiftly.  “First and foremost, North Mine is like a fortress.  It’s currently tapping one of the richest seams of sap in the entire Reach.  That they’re keeping low key in the news and whatnot because they don’t want pirates and the like to know how valuable the place is.  But Hannan isn’t stupid.  The place is isolated, nearly two days good ride from the nearest Colonial Guard post and out of reach by radio except for one small, vulnerable relay station.  So they’re taken precautions.  The place is bristling with more guns than some entire navies and they could easily survive a siege for months with all of the supplies their constantly moving up there.  With all of this recent pirate craziness, there are only two places to be where safety is practically guaranteed: off-world and North Mine.”

“But when we were in Walton Harbor, when the place started exploding, were just a few hours from a gate out.  I’d say off-world would be even more safe than North, personally.  So why keep going closer and closer to the danger?  Doesn’t make much sense.”

“Because,” Quincy chimed in as he walked up from behind them, putting his arm on Hank’s shoulder, “Levi here has a job to do.  It’s about duty.  You’re young, yet, but you have a duty on this job just like everyone else.  Abigail and I have the duty to perform our jobs at North.  Mr. Spriggs is responsible for seeing us there safely.”

“I see,” Hank said, nodded his head to himself.  “Well, I suppose it can still be a little fun in the process, right?”

He turned and walked through a nearby door, likely looking for something to occupy his time.  Levi turned and glanced at Quincy, who had a slight grin upon his face.  There was something oddly dark in that smile.

“It’s not duty, unfortunately.”

“Oh, I know, son.  But that’s probably not something to be telling the boy, is it?”

“No, I suppose not,” Levi said, pausing.  “Why do you think I keep going?”

“Hard to say.  We’ve all done things we try to run from.”

Levi shook his head.

“No, I’m not running from anything.  Running toward something, more like it.  I thought it was just a desire to be back in the game, you know?  I’d didn’t particularly like what I did during the war, but I was good at it.  I was starting to go a little stir-crazy sitting in that office of mine.  I thought that maybe, if I went on this trip, I’d calm down.  The strangest thing of all, though, if that it hasn’t gone away; even now, after all that’s happened.”

“Well, then.  Whenever you’re told you should turn around, what do you think?”

He thought about this for a moment before responding.

“I think that no pirate is going to dictate what I do.  That I have a job to do and I’m going to do it, if they like that or not.”

“Sounds a little more like duty than you thought, eh,” Quincy said, giving another smile.  He patted Levi on the shoulder and moved past him down the corridor.  As he went, something clicked in Levi’s brain and he quickly turned and looked after the man.

“Are you running, Quincy?”

“Like I said,” he grinned over his shoulder, “we’re all running from something.”

A short time later, the skies began to darken ahead of schedule.  The fantastic weather that had followed the group north was finally starting to break and if the forecasts from the bridge could be believed, it was going to break in a major way.  Moving out onto the deck, Levi looked off into the horizon to see a line of darkness cruising through the sky.  It crackled with lightning which was already visible and small funnels of black cloud could be seen dropping from its bottom down to the great, flat plains below.  This was going to be a big one, Levi knew.

The ship pushed on for a little longer before the winds started to violently buffet it back and forth.  A couple minor articles were lost over the railing before Simon had finally ordered the ship grounded.  It was hard going, as far as airship flying was concerned, and the helmsman struggled to keep the ship aligned as best he could.  They had waited too long to put her down, Levi could see, as the floor under his feet pitched in odd yet familiar ways.  If the Iron Dove hadn’t been a militarily designed vessel, it would’ve probably been thrown many miles off course if not wrecked completely.

As it was, however, they were able to touch down in a small depression out in the middle of nowhere, relatively speaking.  It was still a rough place to be, since the airship hadn’t exactly been designed for ground-based wind patterns, but the ship managed to hold itself together thanks to the large anchors that had been thrown out upon touchdown.  The rain started to pelt the vessel just a few minutes later and Levi couldn’t help but equate the sound to that of gunfire.  It was almost deafening on the upper decks and most of the crew moved further down into the ship to escape the sound.

These storms moved through the Reach on occasion and most – save the two people not from that world – weren’t terribly concerned.  From the look of things, it wasn’t going to be a very long storm; perhaps only a few hours at most.  The large, flat nature of the Reach lent itself to such weather and most of the inhabitants knew the signs.  That wasn’t to say, however, that nothing bad ever happened.  Even with the day’s modern technology, they could turn dangerous and sometimes even deadly.  Not a month ago, in fact, a particularly fierce storm had swept through a small town a few miles north of South Beach.  The howling wind and pounding rain had virtually obliterated the majority of the town, including the small airship port.  After crews were able to respond and the mess was cleaned up, over one hundred people had been killed.

Levi was thinking about just this event, having read about it in the paper, as he watched the rain out a small porthole.  The horrible pirate attack on Walton Harbor had killed a few dozen, he recalled, and wounded many more.  It had probably taken weeks of planning, perfect orchestration, and expert timing to pull off.  And then Mother Nature, with little regard for such things as towns or people, had haphazardly killed over one hundred without even trying.  It hadn’t been the largest storm ever seen in the Reach.  Had it hit, say, Meadowshire instead, the death toll could’ve easily been much higher.  There was something very ironic about that.

His musings were once more interrupted, however, by Simon.  The man had a troubled expression on his face, which was something that Levi didn’t often see there.  He was, after all, a typically laid back fellow.  These past few days must have been stressing him more than he let on.

“Levi, there’s something you need to see.”

“What is it?”

“Just… just come up to the bridge.”

Shrugging, Levi and Simon made their way up to the airship’s command center.  The rain was exceedingly loud up here, so close to the outside world.  It almost seemed as though the rain would come right through the glass, though Levi knew that the windows could easily take gunfire without too much trouble.  He looked about; trying to figure out what Simon wanted him to see.

“Okay, what are we looking at?”

“Over here,” the captain said, moving over to an observation scope.  “Take a look about five clicks up, two to aft.”

“An interesting cloud,” Levi asked as he positioned himself in front of the scope.  Sarcasm aside, he did as Simon asked, rotating the scope to look up into the stormy, grey-black sky.  At first, he didn’t see anything other than rainclouds, rain, and the occasional dash of lightning.  He was just about to point this out to his friend when something finally caught his eye.  Straining, he tried to focus the scope as best he could.  Finally, the image came into focus.

A small airship, only slightly larger than a personal yacht, was getting itself battered back and forth in the wind currents.  It cut in and out of the clouds, listing dangerously as it seemed to at least attempt to maintain a constant heading.  Though, as Levi watched, it was obvious that the helmsman of the ship had little control; they would go wherever the wind took them.

“It’s a Cirrus Cruiser,” Simon said, knowing Levi had spotted it.

“Indeed,” was all that he could say in reply.

Cirrus Cruisers were, without a doubt, one of the most dangerous airships ever conceived.  Originally designed as meteorological study vessels, they had the capacity to somehow stay aloft during all but the most violent of storms.  Zealous scientists had been using them for a number of years, recently; in attempts to more accurately understand the workings of storms, lightning, cloud formation, and other factors that could have profound implications in agriculture and the like.  It wasn’t long, however, before a rough-weather vessel’s potential was seen by the military.

Soon scouting fleets of cruisers zipped about the skies, their resilience only matched by their speed.  The ability to fly in almost any condition, coupled with their ability to do so quickly, made them perfect at such missions.  The only problem was that, in order to keep weight at a minimum, they were rarely armed with anything.  This made them easy pickings for any ground- or air-based weapons that managed to zero in on them.  With the development of accurate, long-range cannons, the scout vessel soon found itself on the way out, being replaced with the even more agile, if less durable, aeroplane.  Soon, some military analysts said, all airships would share a similar fate.

Pirates, especially those in Franklin Reach, however, saw the obvious benefits to such a craft.  With storms sometimes shutting down towns for a day or more, it was extremely profitable to be able to fly in and do as they wished while all others remained impotent to their actions.  While it never became the major vehicle of sky piracy, again due to its lack of armaments, it became an integral part of their logistics; at least for those pirates that actually worried over such things.  It was possible that the ship he was looking at was simply a foolish science vessel that had gotten a little bit in over its head.  Given all the recent activity, though, he wasn’t so sure.

“Looks like he’s in a bit of trouble,” Levi said, not taking his eye from the scope.

“Aye.  Must be rough on high for it be knocked around like that.”  Simon paused.  “So, what do you think they’re doing?  Not even pirates are stupid enough to keep it in the air when it’s like that.  But then, it isn’t flying its colors, as all ships are required to.”

“Could’ve lost them in the storm.”

“Not likely.”

“Then what else could it be looking for,” Levi asked, finally pulling his head back and looking at Simon.  “They know this storm will down most airships.  My guess is it’s spotting for other ships somewhere close.  As soon as the storm lets up, they hop up and get whatever the cruiser’s found for them.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Simon said, looking distracted.

“And what are those thoughts thinking we should do about it?”

“Hard to say if they’ve spotted us or not.  More importantly, though, it’ll be hard to put shells on target with all of this wind.  I’m willing to give it a try, though.  My men are good shots.”

Levi thought about this for a moment.  It was a tricky decision, to be sure.  If they had already been spotted, then they really didn’t have much to lose.  The Cirrus had likely already radioed their position to the waiting ships.  At least they could do some damage to the enemy before the storm lifted.  On the other hand, if they hadn’t been spotted – which was possible – they would simply be giving away their position by firing on them.  A tricky decision, indeed.

“You’re the captain,” Levi said, wanting to avoid the decision-making for a moment.  “I suppose you should be deciding what to do with your men and your ship.”

“And you’re currently the one paying for all of that,” Simon reminded him.  “So we’re practically just a gun in your hand.  How do you like that image?”

“Fantastic.”  Levi yet again paused to think.  Finally, he nodded to himself.  “Put men on the gun.  Only have them fire if it looks like the ship’s going to leave the area or once the weather breaks and they can get a clear shot.  Have the rest of your men crawling over the radio frequencies, see if they can catch anything bouncing off that tin can.  And last but not least, we need to hit the air the second it’s safe enough to.”

Simon smiled and nodded in return.

“Ah, there’s the Midshipman Wyman I knew.  Always talking battle theory and tactics.  It’s a wonder you were never promoted.”

“That’ll happen when you don’t apply yourself,” Levi said amiably.  “It’s a wonder they didn’t kick you out.  Now get your men moving.”

Simon snapped up into a ridiculously official salute, followed by a bow.

“Sir, yes sir.”

For an hour, they watched the cruiser linger in their general area.  They never picked anything up on the radio besides the occasional broken word.  As the rain pelted the airships, Levi had a momentary pang of pity for the men stationed on deck, manning the big gun.  Sure, they were partially protected and he had seen them taking pieces of tarpaulin to cover up with, but it still probably a miserable stint.  He just hoped Simon hadn’t mentioned that it was his idea.

Finally, though, the rain began to lessen as the darkest of the storm clouds passed by.  Only moments later, the gunner up above called down; weather was clear enough to give him a shot.  Simon glanced to Levi, and then nodded.  The order was given and the gun could be heard shifted about as it zeroed in.  Another breath later, the ship shook slightly as a mighty boom echoed throughout.  Four seconds later, another shot and four seconds after that, yet another.  Levi was following the cruiser through a scope, hoping to see the thing balloon in a ball of flame.  He never saw it, though.

The front of the vessel was clipped, knocking a fair-sized hole and causing the ship to whirl about wildly.  But within moments, its superior speed had moved it out of range and it soon disappeared into the evening sky.  Simon slammed his fists into the helm.

“That was always going to be a hard shot, you know that,” Levi said, trying to calm him down.

“It’s not that.  I just hate running.”  He turned and looked to his men.  “Get us in the air, now.  We’re leaving.”

With expert skill, the crew of the Iron Dove recalled the anchors, untied loose equipment, and lifted the ship into the sky.  They were already far from their mooring spot when Hank finally made his way to the bridge and asked what was going on.