“Row! Bend yer backs to it, y’scuts!”
Smith’s voice had a hard edge from the bows. John knew why; he could hear it without turning from his position at the tiller. A deep chuffing, the hollow sound steam made when exhausted into the stack of a light ship, and the soft continual surf noise of a bow wave curving away from the prow, just on the edge of hearing. The gunboat had picked them up twenty minutes ago, and it had grown from a dot on the horizon to a tiny model boat that grew as he watched, shedding a long plume of black coal smoke behind from its single cylindrical funnel.
“Stroke!” he barked, willing strength to flow from his voice through the crew to the oars. “Stroke! Almost home! Stroke!”
Sweat glistened on their faces, mouths gasping for air. A new sound came through the air, a muffled droning.
“Smith!”
One-handed, John tossed the binoculars to the ex-Marine. He took them and looked upward. “Oh, shit, sir. One of them gasbag things. Just comin’ into sight, like.”
“How many engine pods?”
“Four. No, four at the sides an’ one sort of at the back.”
“Skytiger. Patrol class,” John said. Center helpfully offered schematics and performance specifications. “They’ve got a squadron of them operating out of Salini now.”
The Windstrider was very close. John felt himself leaning forward in a static wave of tension, and grinned tautly at himself. If things went badly, the yacht was no protection at all, merely a way to get a lot of other people killed with him. And his subconscious still felt as if he was racing for absolute safety. A ghost-memory plucked at him, something not his own. Raj Whitehall spurring his riding dog for a barge, with enemies at his heels. . . .
Damn, he thought. You seem to have had a much more picturesque life than me.
Adventure is somebody else in deep shit, far, far away, Raj said. And I think you’re about to be that somebody. Focus, lad, focus.
The long hull loomed up. John threw his weight on the tiller and the whaleboat heeled sharply, turning in its own length to curve around the bow and come down the side away from the Land gunboat. The narrow black slit of the loading door came up fast, perhaps too fast. . . .
“Ship oars!” he called.
The long ashwood shafts came inboard with a toss; Marines were well-trained in small-boat operations. One caught the edge of the steel slit nonetheless, snapping off and punching a rower in the ribs with enough force to bring an agonized grunt. The whaleboat shot into the gloom of the inner well; the overhead arc light seemed to grow brighter as the metal door slid shut. The air was humid, hot, with a smell of machine oil and sweat.
The crew collapsed over their oars, wheezing, faces red and dripping. John vaulted onto the sisal mats that covered the decking—an irony there, since the fiber had probably been imported from the Land—nodded in return to the crew’s salutes, and took the staircase three rungs at a time. The hatchway to the boat chamber clanged shut below him; someone dogged it shut below, and a crewman threw matting over the hatch, leaving it looking identical to the rest of the corridor. He stepped through a doorway, and suddenly he was in the passenger section of the yacht. Soft colorful Sierran carpets underfoot, walnut panelling . . . by the time he reached his cabin, his valet was already towelling down his torso. He changed with rapid, precise movements, stuck a cigarette into a sea-ivory holder, and strolled out on deck.
“About bloody time,” Jeffrey observed, making a show of looking at the approaching Chosen gunboat with his binoculars. “How’d it go?”
“You saw it—a damned ratfu—er, walking disaster.”
Pia came up and took John’s arm. “Tedeschi pigs,” she muttered under her breath. Her eyes were fixed on the Chosen vessel, as well.
Good thing she’s not on the guns, John thought.
There were four guns on the yacht, port and starboard forward and aft of the mid-hull superstructure. Nothing too remarkable about that; any vessel on Visager’s seas had to have some armament, given the size and disposition of the marine life. The two-and-a-half-inch naval quick-firers on pedestal mounts were not entirely typical, however—nor was the fact that they could elevate to ninety degrees. Two were, their muzzles tracking the leisurely approach of the Chosen dirigible; the other two followed the gunboat. That had a three-inch gun behind a shield on the forecastle, another at the stern, and pom-poms—scaled-up machine guns firing a one-pound shell—bristling from either flank. The Chosen captain wouldn’t be worried about the purely physical aspects of any confrontation, even without the airship. Although that confidence was possibly overstated, since the yacht had an underwater torpedo tube on either side.