CHAPTER 44
Lizanne
“Our lot are running,” Morva shouted, hair whipping in the wind as she leaned out of the Typhoon’s side hatch, peering through her goggles at the battlefield below. “Greens are everywhere.”
“Reds?” Lizanne shouted back.
“Not that I can see.”
Lizanne moved forward, making her way to Tekela’s side and telling the gunners manning the Growlers in the side hatches to get ready. “Give me one minute then take us lower,” she said. “Below two thousand feet.”
“That’s well within the ceiling for a Red,” Tekela pointed out.
“I know. But we need to make sure we drop in the right place.”
Lizanne injected a burst of Blue and quickly tranced with the Blood-blessed in the Tempest and the newly constructed Hurricane and Whirlwind, ordering them to follow the Typhoon. Slipping out of the trance, she gripped a handhold as Tekela put the aerostat into a steep dive.
“Reds ahead!” she called from the pilot’s seat, her voice soon drowned out by the roar of the Growlers. Lizanne moved to a window to watch the tracer bullets streaming into the gloom, the arcing streams soon bisected by the larger shells from the Thumpers carried by the Hurricane and the Whirlwind. These featured a new modification from Jermayah, a fuse that would cause them to explode after a distance of four hundred yards. Consequently, the sky surrounding the aerostats soon began to resemble a firework display. Lizanne saw Reds illuminated by the exploding shells, brief, frozen glimpses of the beasts banking and coughing flame, none of which came close to the aerostats. She had the satisfaction of counting four caught in the act of being blasted out of the sky before Tekela hauled back on the control lever and called out, “Nineteen hundred feet!”
“Slow and level!” Lizanne called back, moving to the apparatus newly fitted to the floor of the gondola. It was an uncomplicated contraption consisting of a telescope positioned vertically within a frame to which a small lever had been attached. The lever was connected to a taut steel cable that descended through the base of the gondola to the release mechanism below. Lizanne injected a one-second burst of Green and pressed her eye to the telescope, placing one hand on the lever. She tried to blot out the continuing roar of the guns, punctuated by a rich stream of profane fear and exhilaration from the gunners. The view through the telescope was chaotic at first, drifting smoke shrouding a landscape of numerous fires and the ant-like forms of running people. However, thanks to the Green she was able to ascertain that they were about to fly over the southern fringe of the Jet Sands.
Where are they? she thought as the landscape slid beneath, her concentration soon broken by a shout from Morva.
“The Tempest is on fire!”
Cursing, Lizanne removed her eye from the telescope, moving to the hatch where Morva crouched with her mini-Growler in hand. She fired just as Lizanne came to her side, sending a stream of bullets into the belly of a Red as it swooped by, flames jetting from its mouth. It let out a screech and tumbled in the air, plummeting towards the earth in a tangle of wings and tail.
Lizanne tore her gaze away and concentrated on the Tempest, seeing the fire licking at the rear of her envelope. The aerostat was still keeping pace with them but her course was becoming more wayward, the craft heaving up and down as the fire spread. Lizanne switched her gaze on the large, barrel-shaped object hanging beneath the craft’s gondola. Not yet, she implored. Just a little longer.
Her eyes jerked upwards at a burst of fire from the gunner in the cupola atop the Tempest’s envelope. The gunner had her mini-Growler raised high and unleashed a stream of bullets at a large Red streaking down towards the aerostat in a vertical dive. The beast’s head was shredded by the concentrated fire but its dive continued, the corpse slamming into the aerostat and causing it to lose height. Lizanne managed to catch sight of the barrel-shaped object detaching from the gondola before a dozen Reds swooped down to bathe the Tempest in fire. Her envelope exploded, leaving only a cloud of wreckage trailing flame as it streamed towards the ground.
“Hold on!” Lizanne ordered, moving back from the hatch and taking a firm hold on the central beam.
The explosion was everything Tinkerer promised and more. The gondola’s windows glowed orange as a massive gust of superheated air pushed the Typhoon up, tilting her at an acute angle as Tekela fought to keep control. The aerostat veered to the west, Tekela pushing the engines to their highest speed to take her clear of the turbulent air. When they levelled out Lizanne went to the rear window, finding that the Hurricane and the Whirlwind were now several hundred yards away, meaning the Typhoon would have to rely on her own guns for protection.
“Turn us around,” she ordered Tekela, moving to return her eye to the telescope. She found that the Typhoon had been pushed clear of the Jet Sands and was now over the river. The ground pivoted as Tekela killed power to the starboard engine before reversing its propeller, turning them around in a swift pirouette. An unforeseen advantage of the Tempest’s demise and premature release of its device was that the skies around Typhoon were now clear of Reds. Consequently, they flew unmolested for several minutes as Lizanne watched the river pass by below and the ground transform into a frozen seascape of black dunes. She blinked in surprise as a dense formation of infantry trooped by directly below, thousands of Spoiled moving in a rapid march no doubt intending to turn the night’s defeat into a disastrous rout.
“Stop!” she shouted, keeping her eye pressed to the telescope. She placed her hand on the release lever, waiting until the vanguard of the White’s army had passed beneath the Typhoon. Not yet . . . not yet. She forced herself to count to ten then pressed the lever.
The Typhoon instantly began to rise as the huge weight of the device fell away, ascending at least three hundred feet in the time it took for the barrel-shaped silhouette to shrink into a speck, whereupon the view through the telescope instantly turned white. Lizanne let out a pained gasp at the brightness of it, snapping her head away, eye streaming. The shock wave hit them a heart-beat later, far more powerful than the first. Lizanne found herself careening around the gondola as the aerostat bucked and heaved in the artificial storm. When it finally settled Lizanne pressed her undazzled eye to the telescope, finding much of the western edge of the Jet Sands had been transformed into something that resembled a huge scratched mirror.
“Reds!” one of the gunners shouted, his Growler blasting out a hail of bullets a second later.
“Due south,” Lizanne told Tekela. She injected a burst of Red and moved to the blood-burner’s ignition tube, hitting the switch to flood the combustion chamber with product. All the Typhoon’s guns were firing by the time she lit the engine, the acceleration sending her onto her back as the aerostat sped away from the pursuing Reds.
They stayed aloft for as long as their ammunition lasted, re-forming with the Hurricane and the Whirlwind to launch repeated attacks on the pursuing Reds as the Varestian army retreated along the coast. The two massive detonations on the Jet Sands appeared to have halted the White’s ground forces, at least for now, but the Reds continued to harass the defenders as they fled south. Lizanne tranced with the Blood-blessed in the other aerostats to co-ordinate their efforts, attacking the mass of drakes in relays. The Typhoon would streak through the whirling pack on thermoplasmic power, all guns blazing, moving too fast for the drakes to catch. As the Reds recovered, the Hurricane and the Whirlwind would light their blood-burners and fly through the flock in opposite directions. This succeeded in disrupting the drakes’ pursuit long enough for Arberus to establish a rear-guard position atop some high ground ten miles to the south.
The Reds’ assaults on the rear guard were beaten back by massed fire from all the Growlers and Thumpers remaining in the army. With the advent of daylight the Reds no longer enjoyed the protection of darkness and, with no support on the ground, were much more vulnerable to the repeating guns. Arberus later reported that over a hundred had been hacked out of the sky by the time they abandoned their attacks. The general had been quick to get his remaining forces moving south, sadly without many of their Thumpers, which had to be destroyed in place for want of transport.
As the army retreated the Varestian fleet kept pace with them, staying close to the shore in order to bring a mass of gunnery down on any pursuing forces should it be needed. However, Lizanne’s subsequent reconnaissance flights revealed that the White’s army had encamped a few miles south of the Sands. Their commander had evidently taken full notice of the events of the previous night, setting out the camp in a series of small widely spaced enclosures beneath skies constantly patrolled by Reds. Even so, Lizanne felt that if she had another five such devices they could have wiped out the Spoiled for good. Sadly they didn’t. Word from the Mount related that a lack of crucial chemical agents meant they could only produce one more device, and that would take at least another week. Lizanne sent instructions for them to concentrate all efforts on finishing the device whilst any spare labour would be required to work multiple shifts to make good the losses in Thumpers.
It took five days for the army to make a full withdrawal to Gadara’s Redoubt. Much of their food had been left behind at the Sands meaning they had to be constantly resupplied by the fleet whilst the aerostats made repeated flights to evacuate the worst of the wounded. Arberus maintained a harsh pace throughout the retreat, something that did little to endear him to the troops, whose morale had already suffered in the aftermath of defeat. Desertion reached alarming proportions, some ten thousand troops disappearing over the course of two days. However, many soon returned after coming to the realisation that, in a land denuded of most of its population where the few crops had been destroyed, there was nowhere to go. Consequently, it was a bedraggled and none-too-happy army that limped into camp below the Redoubt. Some units stayed firm, particularly the companies formed of pirates and the volunteers who had followed Varkash to defend their homeland. Others were far less resolute and many soon began agitating for immediate evacuation from the peninsular.
“Pick out the biggest loudmouths and put them in front of a firing squad,” Varkash suggested at the council of war Lizanne convened at the Redoubt. “Or hang them if you’d rather save the ammunition.”
“That will set the whole army to riot,” Arberus said. “A few days of rest and decent food will do much to restore their discipline.”
“If the Spoiled will give us that long,” Alzar said. “Besides which, cowards they may be but it doesn’t make them wrong. If we couldn’t stand against the monsters at the Sands, how can we stand against them here?”
Arberus began to reply but Lizanne caught his eye and shook her head. “We can’t,” she told them. “Not indefinitely. But General Arberus assures me that we can hold out for several days, perhaps longer. And it is important that we do so.”
“Why?” Alzar asked. “We can transport the army to Iskamir, gather more strength.”
“Leaving the White to advance into the heart of the peninsular,” Lizanne said. “Where there are far more people than we could ever hope to evacuate. Once there the White can gather an army so great there will be no force in this world that can stop it. We have to hold here, for as long as we can.” She paused, unsure of how to explain her reasoning. She was asking a great deal of these people, many would die if they continued to follow her lead. But many more might live. “A man is coming here,” she said. “A Blood-blessed, bearing a new weapon found in the Arradsian Interior. Something that can kill the White.”
“What kind of weapon?” Alzar demanded. “And why haven’t we heard of this before?”
“Because the White knows the secrets of every human it makes into a monster,” Lizanne replied. “Which is why I will not tell you the nature of this weapon. Suffice to say that if we can keep the White’s attention on us for the next month, we have a chance to end this.”
“We wounded them badly at the Sands,” Arberus added. “They’ll be more wary of us now, more cautious, and a cautious enemy is a slow enemy.”
Alzar’s doubts were plain but he gave a slow nod. “Very well. I’ll take a tour of the camp, speak to these malcontents. See if I can’t harden a few hearts.”
“My lot will happily form the firing squad if you can’t,” Varkash offered.
“Good to see time has done a lot to mellow your soul,” Alzar observed dryly.
Lizanne expected Varkash to bridle at this but he just laughed. “What use is a mellow soul in an age such as this?”