The Cavorite Job
Ian Tregillis
It wasn’t until the alien tripod burst forth from the mountainside forest, lambent energy beams sizzling through the monsoon-soaked air like billion-candela spotlights celebrating a West End premiere, and rather inconveniently piercing the Black Shiva’s envelope of hydrogen lifting gas—the very same airship from which, it was important to note, she currently dangled by swollen fingertips from a rain-slick rope ladder—that Captain Sujata Malhotra finally accepted what others on the crew had sensed from the beginning: they never, ever should have taken this job.
“Wellington!” she bellowed into the teeth of the storm. “You thrice-damned scalawag! I’ll cut your—”
But she had scant opportunity to express her displeasure, for the very next moment the remnants of a tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal slammed into the Shiva. The ship, already spiraling earthward like a wounded pigeon, now jinked to port hard enough to snap the ladder like a whip. And, not inconsequentially, tearing said ladder from her grip.
It was later remarked, by those in a unique position to witness these events, that Captain Sujata fell less like a wounded pigeon and more like an anchor weight filled with piss and rage.
* * *
The setting sun had turned a dusky red to port, like the meat of a blood orange suspended abeam of the Shiva, as they crossed the last few miles of ocean between Ceylon and the mainland. It was the final leg of a long loop around the Indian Ocean to meander through the Malay Archipelago. The Malay route was a favorite, combining as it did two of Sujata’s favorite things: a plethora of ships fat with trade, and a dearth of octos. For now, at least, the aliens and their chromium-plated tripods seemed to avoid the deep ocean around the Spice Islands.
As usual, they had crossed paths with several airships of foreign registry; these they relieved of troublesome ballast. It was a purely humanitarian gesture, of course, aiding ships in danger of sinking to the bottom of the sky. The Shiva had a moral obligation to help given its active role in the sinkings, and the fact that naval vessels had become a rare sight ever since the octo invasion had sent so many loyal tars to the darkness above and below. As a result of its humanitarian largesse, the Shiva lumbered to port with holds near to bursting.
Sujata watched from the bridge, feeling the thrum-thrum-thrum of the engines through the soles of her boots.
Turcotte, her helmsman and navigator, eased the Shiva toward port with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a shaving mirror. He’d spent half the voyage admiring the tattoo he’d acquired in Sumatra to commemorate winning a no-rules Kuntao cage tournament held behind a particularly colorful house of ill-repute outside Bandar Lampung. It was, she had to admit, a noteworthy accomplishment given that Turcotte had entered the competition armed only with a vague knowledge of the Malaysian martial art that barely extended beyond its pronunciation. On the other hand, they were entering some of the most crowded airspace she’d seen since before the first tripods had landed in London. Seemed like half the empire had fled to India to prop up the Raj.
“Mr. Turcotte! If I see that looking glass in your hand one more time before we dock, I swear upon all that is good and holy that I will personally insert it so far up your nethers that you will shit marbles from now until Boxing Day.”
The mirror disappeared into a pocket of Turcotte’s cargo trousers. He turned a dial on the helm and muttered into a speaking tube; moments later the engine rhythm slowed to a lethargic whoom-whoom-whoom. The lowering sun sent the Shiva’s shadow lancing across the ocean. And it evoked little flashes of light from the darkening continent. Like the glint of sunlight on cavalry sabers. Or alien tripods.
The captain sighed. Everybody knew it was only a matter of time before the octos turned their tentacles to the more far-flung corners of the Empire.
Damn you, Jack Scaly.
Turcotte saw it, too. “Bloody octos,” he muttered.
Sujata yanked the speaking tube from its clamp above the helm. “Vi! Ready the guns.”
The deck lurched four times in rapid succession. A quartet of armaments each the size of an elephant’s thigh slid out of recessed compartments around the airship. Turcotte adjusted the trim. If the weaponeer lost the reins, the kick from those buggers could overpower the engines and push a ship like the Shiva halfway to the stars. If loaded with white phosphorus rounds and a bit of luck, they could pierce an octo tripod and set it ablaze. Merely loaded with regular munitions, as they were at the moment, they could shoot clean through the House of Lords. Or so it was said; fortune hadn’t favored them with an opportunity to try it.
The chain guns were, technically, illegal for any ship not on the naval register. But navy scrap could be had for a song these days. At least, those bits that hadn’t burned up in the atmosphere or been melted by Jack Scaly’s energy beams. (Damn you twice, Jack Scaly.) Besides, the Shiva’s letter of marque afforded them a certain amount of latitude.
The speaking tube turned the weaponeer’s voice into a raspy whisper. It said, “Guns away, captain. Trouble?”
“None whatsoever. But load whatever’s left of the phosphorus belts before going to regular shot.”
Meanwhile, Turcotte used another to speak to the engine room. “Spin ‘em up, de Vries. Full power on standby.”
The engineer’s response came out of the tube clearly enough for Sujata to hear: “Really glad there’s no trouble whatsoever up there.” The deck rattled in time to the turbines’ acceleration.
By now the sun had melted halfway into the horizon. The ruby-red sky cast a softer illumination across the source of the metallic flashes. An array of cannon and the gleaming spires of a new Tesla palisade ringed the Madras aerodrome. No tripods, no octos. Just new preparations for their arrival. Turcotte exhaled.
Sujata issued the order to stand down. “Mr. Turcotte, find us a berth so we can get down there and get rich off our hard-earned and entirely legal cargo.”
The whine of turbines shook the deck as one by one the guns flopped back into their niches, unused and unneeded. But Sujata’s gaze didn’t waver from the perimeter defenses as the gloaming draped them in shadow. The Madras ‘drome hadn’t been armed to the teeth when they departed two months earlier. But now it was, meaning the octos had landed on the subcontinent. It was only a matter of time before the tripods thrashed their way across the Raj, tearing bloody great furrows in civilization as they had in Europe.
Damn you thrice, Jack Scaly.
* * *
A sweaty man in a tweed suit, grossly overdressed for the subtropical heat, met them at their birth. Wellington was their contact with HM’s government, or what was left of it, back in London.
First the ‘drome gets new anti-octo defenses. Then Wellington drops in unannounced, thought Sujata. All the shit is rolling downhill, isn’t it?
Body language reflected a similar wariness among her lieutenants as they gathered around Wellington. It ranged from scowls and glowering (Turcotte, though to be fair the tattoos did much of the heavy lifting for his face) to a carefully affected loucheness (Violet, her weaponeer, who at the moment smelled of black powder and sulphur), to icy civility (de Vries, her engineer, and one of the best things she’d ever stolen from Malaysia).
Sujata said, “Mr. Wellington. It’s not that I don’t enjoy surprises—I don’t—but surely you haven’t come all the way from London just to see us? Flattered as we would be to think otherwise.”
“Aha,” said the bureaucrat. It was his nervous tick, something he did when lying, or stalling for time, or both. “A pleasure as always, captain.”
He’s been relocated, she realized. The situation in Europe hasn’t improved.
“What’s this about? We have cargo to unload and mind-altering liquids to drink.” This met with grumbling approval from the crew.
“Well. I wonder if you’d be interested in a commission? Nothing dangerous, I assure you. A bit of a change of pace for you, perhaps, something inland rather than over the open sea.”
“What’s so interesting inland?”
“A warehouse.”
“Uh-huh. And would this warehouse also be of interest to Jack Scaly?”
“Oh, goodness, no. Aha. I rather doubt the octos would find it the least bit interesting, if they even knew of this place. Which I’m rather sure they don’t. Aha.”
That made two ahas in the same utterance and three in the half minute since he greeted them. Only a fool would take him at his word.
“Well, Mr. Wellington, I’ve truly enjoyed our chat, aha, as I always do, aha. But I’m afraid I’ll have to decline your very kind offer to spice up our working routine with variety and a complete lack of adventure or danger.”
“Ah,” said Wellington. He plucked the pince-nez from his face. Then he produced a cotton handkerchief and set about wiping the sweat from the spectacles. The hypnotic pattern on the cotton indicated it had been woven on one of Mr. Babbage’s modern successors to the Jacquard loom, according to a mathematical pattern discovered by the Countess Lovelace. It was said the duo turned a pretty penny licensing spinoffs from their mathematical endeavors applying computational engines to orbital calculations for the Royal Navy. They probably had little else to occupy them in the wake of the octo invasion and the rout in orbit.
The government man ran the cloth over the lenses in slow spirals, saying, “Well. I would be a liar if I said I was surprised. An eminently reasonable decision on your part, captain. And, may I just take this opportunity to say that were I in your rather colorful shoes I would doubtless make the same choice.”
A look of confusion, tinged with greater or lesser amounts of skepticism, ricocheted from one lieutenant to the next. Sujata intercepted it. “So we’re not to be punished for turning down your offer?”
Wellington looked as though she’d just accused him of killing a man for his brolly. “Dear heavens! I should hope not. We in Whitehall are not savages, in spite of what you may have heard. If we were to compromise our principles at the first sign of duress, why, we’d be little better than animals. We were the queen’s subjects prior to the octo invasion, we’re her subjects now, and we’ll still be her subjects when we’ve driven Jack Scaly back to the inky void between the stars.”
Turcotte clapped. “Hear hear!”
“Yes, yes. No doubt,” Sujata said. “Well, I wish you luck in that endeavor, Mr. Wellington. Meanwhile we’ll be doing what we do best. Good day to you.”
She’d turned and gone three strides when Wellington made a single embarrassed cough into his handkerchief. He sounded, for all the world, like a man struggling to put the very best light on the fact his dog had just diddled in the queen’s handbag. The crew heard it. Shoulders slumped.
“On a completely unrelated note,” he said, “there is, I’m sorry to say, the issue of your letter of marque.”
Sujata remembered that she carried a pistol and a saber. But she ran her hands down her braids, counted to ten, and turned to face the government man again. “I’m sure I don’t understand. The terms of our agreement are, I’m quite certain, in perfect order.”
“Indeed. Indeed,” he said. “There can be little question the Black Shiva has adhered to the terms of the original letter quite admirably, performing along the way great service to the queen.”
“Original letter?” Her hand fell to the pistol at her waist.
“Yes. This is a somewhat, aha, delicate issue. Not something we’re proud to admit. But the fact is that the resources required to fight the octos have put quite a strain on the national coffers. The Foreign Office has seen fit to reach out to our continental cousins to strike an alliance that we might together marshal our forces and bring an end to this tiresome invasion rather sooner than later.” Wellington brought the handkerchief to his mouth and again emitted that delicate cough. “However, and this is a bit embarrassing, as I’m sure you can imagine, the fact that HM government has sanctioned patriotic privateers such as yourselves to scavenge what you can from the holds of ships flying under foreign colors—the very same colors we now court for this alliance—is, well, awkward. So it has been decided that any active letters of marque shall be rescinded.”
A letter of marque was the distinction between a privateer and a pirate; the difference between official sanction and the gallows. The careers were the same, only their ends differed. Privateers could retire; retirement for a pirate meant a long drop and a short rope.
Violet looked ready to choke the man. A vein throbbed in Turcotte’s forehead. He’d gone the color of a boiled beetroot. “You unbelievable arsehole.”
“My hands are tied, I’m afraid. Although I have heard that certain letters may be reconsidered in situations where mitigating circumstances might apply.”
“Mitigating circumstances.” Beads clicked when Sujata shook her head. “Such as accepting this warehouse job.”
“Oh, captain. It would be untoward for me to speculate.”
“Of course.”
She sighed. “Very well. Tell us about this warehouse.”
“You’ve changed your mind then? Capital!”
“Yes, I’m all aflutter at the opportunity. So tell us about the gods-damned warehouse.”
“Aha,” said Wellington. He made to cough again, thought better of it, and folded the silk into his pocket. “Tell me, captain. What do you know of cavorite?”
* * *
After the bureaucrat departed, Sujata studied her lieutenants. Now their expressions ranged from gobsmacked (Vi), to angry (Turcotte), to the narrowed eyes of profound wariness (de Vries).
“Well?”
Turcotte, never one to mince words, said, “I think we tell him to go bugger himself with a steam-powered badger.”
Vi wrinkled her nose. “This doesn’t smell right.”
“If it’s so easy,” said de Vries, “why haven’t they done this themselves?”
“It does beg the question.” Sujata chewed her lip, thinking.
“It’s dangerous as hell,” said Turcotte.
“Unquestionably.”
The engineer said, with the tone of voice like somebody testing the ice on a frozen lake, “One might suppose the warehouse wasn’t fully assayed, or that some fraction of its contents was lost in the confusion following the octo landings…” He left it at that. A simple observation, nothing more. Certainly nothing to suggest he was thinking about his share of any potential profits. And that such profits might be astronomical.
“Can’t spend money when you’re croaked,” said Turcotte. The more Sujata chewed her lips, the unhappier he looked. “I reckon you know that, captain, mum.”
“Rest assured I do,” she said. Long exhalations all around as the officers relaxed. She waited a moment before adding, nonchalantly, “Vi, just out of curiosity, how long would it take to crack open the phosphorus rounds?”
Turcotte sighed. “Hell’s bloody bells. She’s already making a plan.”
Vi ran her hands through her hair; they left sooty highlights in their wake. “We’re going to die,” she said.
“Well. At least we’ll die rich,” said de Vries.
“No,” said Turcotte. “We’ll die with our innards wrapped around our throats, wishing we’d had the chance to be rich.”
* * *
Sujata knew what every legitimate independent entrepreneur who occasionally profited from the hardships of others knew about cavorite: that the mere thought of carrying it was a shortcut to a slow and bloody execution.
The mineral, named for its discoverer, some Royal Society egghead, was to the earth’s gravitational radiations as a lead plate was to Mr. Röntgen’s X-rays. As such, it was central to the Royal Navy’s operations at altitudes beyond those attainable by even the most advanced hydrogen airships. The aetherships designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel all relied upon a powerful stock of cavorite plating to shield them from the earth’s gravity, thereby making them nigh weightless and thus enabling their extra-atmospheric maneuverings.
Which is why hanging was too good for a pirate caught pinching the Queen’s cavorite. They’d wreck you good and proper if they found so much as a single anti-dram in the hold. But that hadn’t been a worry for months, much less a temptation, as Dr. Cavor’s famous discovery was now nothing but a footnote in the history of natural philosophy. All the Queen’s cavorite had been lost when Jack Scaly routed the Royal Navy in orbit. By now, half of it was scattered across the celestial spheres; the other half had given rise to some spectacular displays of falling stars over the British Empire, the Czar’s Russia, and points beyond. As had the more mundane wreckage of the Royal Navy.
Stealing cavorite was a shortcut to an abrupt end to one’s career. It was also, in theory, a shortcut to unimaginable profit: foreign powers would empty their national coffers just for a peek at the material.
So if the Black Shiva took this job, and if the warehouse was just as Wellington described, and if the warehouse records weren’t entirely accurate (or easily forged), and if it just so happened that some of the cavorite from the warehouse accidentally slipped into hidden compartments in the Shiva’s hold through an entirely innocent mistake, and if the crew later found it and accidentally sold it to the highest bidder …
Well, that would be enough money for a smart captain to retire and move somewhere very far away where she didn’t have to worry about a brace of alien tripods mucking up her morning tea.
* * *
Wellington gave them a map. The warehouse of T. David England and Sons, Victuallers to the Crown by Royal Charter since the Year of Our Lord 1822, lay hundreds of leagues away in the mountainous forests of the Uttarakhand province. (An improbably patriotic name, thought Sujata. She wondered what other names Mr. England had answered to before turning his back on the life of a confidence trickster to enjoy respectable employ as a war profiteer.) Fortunately for the Empire, the richest cavorite mine in the world lay inside its borders; the warehouse was actually a compound comprising a refinery for the raw mineral, a weighing station for the refined cavorite, and a storage facility.
Wellington’s map conveniently omitted any indication that the nearest tripod landings had been less than twenty leagues from the warehouse. Strange that Jack Scaly had chosen to land in the hinterlands of the subcontinent; in Europe, the slimy devil had gone straight for the capital cities. When Sujata confronted him about the omission, he pulled out his handkerchief.
“Aha,” he said. “An oversight, I’m quite certain. But you needn’t worry about the octos, for HM navy will be your beard, yes! Aha. Once we sight the Shiva north of the upper Ganges, we’ll send a sortie of frigates and corvettes straight into the heart of their nefarious nest. Jack Scaly will have his tentacles full dealing with the righteous fury of loyal tars armed with phosphorus, blades, and a taste for vengeance. That devil will never notice you.”
“Oh. Well, that’s very reassuring. Aha.”
Turcotte used the map to chart a course into the rolling hills of the north. Reports from inland were spotty; Jack Scaly had played merry hob with the telegraph lines. But rumors and grumblings among the denizens of Madras’s watering holes put at least four octo nests between the Shiva’s berth and the warehouse. Running that gauntlet required creative navigation. So Sujata was content to let Turcotte take the time he needed to do the job right. Besides. It took several days for the crew to offload their cargo and turn it into cash. The cash turned into a spool of steel cable, welding gear, fuel, additional miscellany of varied and sturdy purpose, plus a truly astonishing amount of ammunition, including phosphorus rounds. In spite of the extra weight they took on—in the words of de Vries, the spool alone was “heavier than a pregnant elephant dipped in lead”—they procured only a single bladder’s worth of spare hydrogen. They wouldn’t need it, if Wellington’s figures were correct.
They couldn’t be. His figures were absurd.
But Sujata did the math, and Turcotte checked her figures and found them sound. And then they re-did their sums assuming Wellington was a particularly well-dressed opium addict. After that, they revised their calculations downward yet again, on the logical assumption that a cavorite refinery would be paid on a sliding scale pinned to the purity of its product. And the merchant hadn’t been born who wouldn’t occasionally let his thumb fall upon the scale when there were government guineas to be had. Or, in this case, under the scale.
* * *
On the docks, she had asked Wellington, “How much?”
“Approximately seven hundred thousand anti-stones, with a purity between ninety-five and ninety-seven percent.”
Vi said, “That sounds like … a lot.”
Sujata did the math in her head; Turcotte, despite having taken no few blows to the head during his tournament, got there a second later. That’s why she paid him. His fists weren’t without their uses—occasionally his elbows, knees, feet, fingernails, and teeth, too—but she kept him around for his brain. A navigator had to know numbers; Turcotte knew them as though he’d gone on week-long benders through the sleaziest parts of Shanghai with each and every digit and returned with tattoos to prove it.
“That’s a displacement of over forty-five hundred tons! Bugger me sideways and call me missus.”
“Anti-tons,” Wellington said. “Technically.”
De Vries cleared his throat. “Captain, this is absurd. That’s many times the Shiva’s displacement. It’s not possible.”
Wellington came as close to displaying an emotion as Sujata had ever witnessed. Perhaps he had gas. “We have an entire navy to stock, Mr. de Vries.”
Under his breath, Turcotte said to Vi, “Not any more, the way I hear it.”
Sujata turned on him. “Stow it,” she said. Then to the government man, she added, “A cynical person—not me, mind you, but a cynical person—might wonder why, if you have all this cavorite sitting around doing nobody any good while Jack Scaly makes a hash of things on earth and in heaven, you haven’t scooped it up.”
Vi giggled. “And up. And up. And …”
“Aha. Well. As you can imagine, the octos have taken quite an interest in the navy since our engagement above the atmosphere. If we started outfitting a new fleet in the hinterlands of the Raj, Jack Scaly would notice. And set upon us immediately before we had a sporting chance.”
“Bloody octos,” said Turcotte. “No honor!”
“Yeah. They lack the benefit of an honorable profession like ours,” said Sujata. “But if we were to offload the warehouse …”
Wellington nodded. “Jack Scaly wouldn’t blink twice. Assuming he has eyes to blink, the devil.”
* * *
Sujata’s stroke of genius—she felt comfortable calling it that, even if the crew hadn’t yet come around—was to realize that it would be easier and faster to steal the entire warehouse rather than just its contents. The key was to utilize the cavorite’s gravitational shielding properties to hasten its theft. Evenly distributed through the warehouse, it would reduce the weight of the metal dome to the merest fraction of its unshielded value. Meaning that once the foundation piles were severed—courtesy of demolition fuses built from the phosphorus Vi had extracted from the armaments—the Black Shiva could lift the entire building, cavorite and all, and feel nothing but the weight of the floor under the cavorite. Unloading the entire warehouse would take a day or more, but the building could be cut free in half the time: a worthy consideration with Jack Scaly prowling the jungles. Further, the anti-gravitational properties of the mineral would lessen the weight not only of the warehouse dome but of everything above it—including the Shiva itself, thereby boosting its lifting power.
* * *
The Shiva set sail two days later, turning inland just as a particularly unwelcome line of squalls crested the horizon behind them. A tropical depression in the Bay of Bengal set the mercury falling like a perforated frigate. Sujata watched the oncoming storm through her spyglass. Without benefit of the glass, and the Shiva’s altitude, the squalls would have been still hidden across the ocean. The storm couldn’t surprise them now, but it could still make them unhappy. What a shame that even the strongest wind couldn’t blow the octos back to the stars. More stubborn than a sack full of barnacles was old Jack Scaly.
Turcotte stood at the wheel, keeping one eye on the cross winds, another on the engine readouts, and some unseen mystical third eye on the navigation chart he’d marked for the voyage. He somehow also noticed his captain’s preoccupation with the receding horizon.
“Trouble, captain?”
Sujata knocked the spyglass against her hip. It telescoped, clink-clink-clinking like fine china to become a tube small enough to fit in her coat pocket. She dropped it there, saying, “I was just thinking, Mr. Turcotte, that this might go down as one of my very best plans. The capstone of our careers.”
“Really? Because I was thinking it would probably be the one where we all end up dead.”
“Everybody dies, Mr. Turcotte. Even people as pretty as you and me. Well, pretty as me and as … elaborately decorated as yourself.”
The deck shivered as a cross-gust shook the airship’s lifting body. Turcotte paused to adjust their bearing. This time he did consult the chart, just long enough to convince himself the Shiva still lay dead-center in the first of several emerald-green lines zigzagging across Wellington’s map. Each segment bisected a blood red line connecting the rumored locations of octo nests.
He said, “This is a terrible idea, captain. We all feel it. Let’s say to hell with the octos and science and set course for a place where neither can follow.”
“That’s the problem, Mr. Turcotte. If you can find me a place where Jack Scaly won’t soon follow, we’ll set course for it today. But I think you’ll find it exists nowhere on the Lord’s earth, and certainly not in the heavens above.”
“So we’re doing this out of patriotic duty?”
“We’re doing this because I want to one day retire and spend my afternoons sipping tea in a rose garden without worrying about some accursed octo tripod wobbling over the hills to trample the bushes and incinerate everything else.”
“Oh.” Turcotte chewed on a fingernail. He worried it for half a minute, then spat the husk through a porthole. “I thought we were doing this to get rich.”
“That, too, Mr. Turcotte.”
“I suppose that when it comes to finding one’s fate, there are worse pursuits.”
But Sujata had produced her spyglass again—snick, click—and returned her attention to the storm. She pulled the speaking tube from its clamp and said, “Mr. de Vries. Spin up the engines. Give them the reins a bit, let them gallop. Wellington hired us for speed. Let’s show him we can deliver.”
The tube funneled his response, and a whiff of petrol, to her. “Aye, captain.”
Turcotte turned a suspicious eye in her direction as she quit the bridge. “You’re sure there’s nothing worrying you, captain?”
“Fetch me if you glimpse any tripods,” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll relieve you in six.”
* * *
They sailed for a night and a day. Sometimes their course let the Shiva ride the rising wind, earning them precious hours, and other times it put the ship bucking and thrashing straight into its teeth like a suicidal skipjack dead-set on hurling itself down a shark’s gullet. The whine of overworked engines became the atonal music by which the plan began to unravel. In other words, it was business as usual aboard the Shiva.
The wind put them hours behind schedule. A bit past one in the morning, Sujata and Turcotte stood on the bridge in darkness broken only by the sepulchral glow from the phosphorescent paint on the instrumentation. A hundred yards underfoot the Ganges River gurgled through the lush valleys of Uttarakhand. But nobody could see them. The moonless night that enabled them to glide unnoticed past the octos also rendered them invisible to the sharpest eyes in the Royal Navy. Assuming Wellington’s talk about providing a beard hadn’t been a skein of lies.
Turcotte asked, “What’s the word, captain?”
They had three options. They could descend, drop anchor, and try to hold position until dawn, when navy eyes could spy the Shiva and initiate the promised diversion. But that would mean putting themselves at the mercy of the cyclone as the fringes they’d skirted all day and night passed over them. Or they could fire up the arclights and turn the ship into the brightest thing for leagues around. But that would draw attention from humans and octos alike, likely defeating the purpose of the diversion. Or they could stay the course and hope like hell there were enough bright sparks among Wellington’s people that the navy would do the sums and catch up soon after sunrise.
Sujata weighed her choices. When the future contained nothing but bad, worse, and worst, it was the captain’s job to choose between them.
“We plunge ahead, Mr. Turcotte. No lights.”
And so they did. Which is how, two hours later, they soared through the middle of an octo nest.
Sujata, who had given up on sleep until the conclusion of their venture, stood at the wheel. Turcotte, whom she had relieved but never felt entirely comfortable away from the wheel when things were tense, dozed in a chair that hung in a corner of the bridge. The green corpse light of the instrumentation glistened from the drool at the corner of his mouth. He snored loudly enough that she didn’t immediately notice how the timbre of the engine noise had changed.
But something pricked her ears. She flung an orange at Turcotte—”Stow it!”—then called down to the engine room. “Trouble down there? No? Idle ‘em for a tick.”
De Vries’s engineers disengaged the rotors. The chuff-chuff-chuff of the props faded away, as did the hum of machinery. Deck vibrations faded as the Shiva stopped fighting the wind. The world fell silent but for the creak of rigging, the susurration of wind, and the gurgle of a mountainside river.
Yet still a faint grinding persisted; it sounded like a drunken nob trying to disentangle a pile of forks.
Turcotte heard it, too. They looked at each other. The whites of his widened eyes glistened at the same moment the realization struck her. The mechanical noise wasn’t coming from the Shiva. It came from below. It was the sound of Jack Scaly’s tripods massaging each other, as they were oddly wont to do.
“Well,” said Turcotte, “we’re buggered.”
Thoughts racing, Sujata spoke into the tube again. “Deploy the guns! Phosphorus rounds only! Engineering, keep the boilers hot but do not engage the rotors!”
A few seconds later the familiar but dreaded quadruple thump of unfolding gun emplacements rattled the deck. Sujata gritted her teeth, hoping the noise wouldn’t draw attention from the inhuman invaders massed somewhere in the darkness below. Hoping they wouldn’t need the guns at all. Hoping to all seven hells they could drift unnoticed past Jack Scaly and his incomprehensible diversions. Hoping the nest was small, and that none of the monsters looked up.
The seconds scuttled past, single file, ushered by the jackrabbit thumping of her heart.
The world contracted to a disjointed series of sensory impressions. The creak of the Shiva’s rigging and metallic grinding of the octos. The jitter of the wheel under her hands as the deployed guns changed the ship’s trim and snagged the wind. The sweet smell of a ruptured orange, the peppery scent of the unlit cheroot tucked behind her ear, the sour odor of the sweat trickling from her armpits. Turcotte eased to his feet as though the octos might hear the creaking of his chair. He exhaled, long and slow.
They drifted with the wind, a silent shadow in a moonless sky. Part of her wondered how long they’d have to wait until they reengaged the engines, and whether the cyclone they’d fled would overcome them.
No death beams lanced up from the jungle to cleave them in two. No tentacles enfolded the airship in a crushing embrace.
After a handful of minutes that felt like decades, Turcotte whispered, “Whew. Thank God for small—”
A thunderous crack interrupted him as an octo heat ray sliced through the jungle, and the air, and his relief. The overwhelming scent of ozone wafted through the cabin portholes. Moments later it mingled with smoke and the smell of a forest fire. Flames leapt from a hundred-meter swath of blazing bombax trees like candles on a giant birthday cake. Ruddy firelight illuminated a pair of alien tripods parked in a clearing. Most of their tentacles were knotted together in a writhing mass of limbs, like an orgy of chromium-plated asps. Sujata glimpsed their frantic struggle to break free of each other. The aliens tossed each other back and forth in the effort to unlimber themselves. No wonder Jack Scaly’s beam had swerved wide of its target: they’d been caught with their knickers down.
But once they pulled apart they’d have the Shiva dead to rights, skewered between triangulated heat rays.
“Weapons!” Sujata yelled. “Target the octos and fire! Set those bastards aflame before they pull apart!”
The deck juddered underfoot and the ship slewed to starboard when Vi’s crew let loose. Phosphorus rounds etched incandescent streaks in the darkness. A rain of silvery-red meteors traced a line of perforations across the clearing and the thrashing octos. One beast took a rapid sequence of hits across the central pod; the phosphorus burned sun-bright, melting through the unearthly metal. Bluish sparks fountained from the ruptured tripod, a sign that the terrestrial oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere wreaked havoc upon mysterious alien chemistries. The air smelled like a thousand snuffed candles. The punctured tripod flailed twice, serpentine limbs spasming.
Another volley tried to slew across the writhing mass to visit the same justice upon the other octo. But the hail of gunfire sheared through the tangled mass of limbs. The surviving tripod lurched free of its dying partner.
Sujata bellowed, “Engines NOW!”
The octo spun like a dervish to stalk the Shiva. A clank shook the airship, and then the deck lurched as the props reengaged. The air sizzled. Sujata slammed the attitude controls to rotate the gimbaled propellers and spun the wheel hard to starboard. Jack Scaly’s heat ray flashed so close to the bridge that she could have sworn she saw the heat ripple of scorched air flashing just beyond the portholes. The ray parried the gunners’ next volley, vaporizing the projectiles before they could find their target. Sujata jinked the controls again, trying to outmaneuver the alien’s invisible beam weapon. But even the fleetest airship was a ponderous thing compared to a tripod. The odor of scorched metal washed through the portholes as the heat beam again sizzled through the night. The airship flung itself upward. Sujata twisted the levers but the portside attitude controls wouldn’t budge. A tremendous crash echoed from the forest below at the same moment de Vries cried, “We’ve lost props one and three!”
“All weapons fire on that bastard before it cuts us in half! All weapons FIRE!”
An incandescent rain of falling stars converged upon the second tripod. The monster thrashed. It ignited another swath of jungle as it struggled to bring its beam to bear on the ship again. Then the phosphorus burned through its skin and the demon went up like a Roman candle.
Damn you, Jack Scaly.
* * *
It was the closest shave in a career characterized by narrow strokes of luck. Less than a yard inward and the heat ray would have sliced through the Shiva’s canopy from stem to stern. Unlike a Navy ship, their hydrogen envelope lacked the benefit of mirrored armor. Jack Scaly’s beam would have filleted them like a trout.
At sunrise, Sujata donned a harness and went out to inspect the damage with de Vries. She saw instantly there was no point in dropping anchor to recover the fallen rotor pods. The heat ray that sheared two props from the Shiva had melted straight through the fittings and vaporized inches of the best Yorkshire steel. Even if they did recover the lost props, and somehow found them miraculously undamaged by their fall, they had no hope of reattaching them to the ship without several weeks in dry dock. Their choices were to turn around and limp back through the gauntlet of octo nests, or limp the last few leagues toward their destination.
They couldn’t afford the repairs, much less new engine pods, without a big payday. And with half their propulsion and maneuverability lost they’d be at the mercy of the weather, as the return course would put them straight at the remnants of the cyclone they’d fled for the past two days. They needed money and they needed to lighten their burden. They needed cavorite.
So they pressed forward.
Turcotte watched the burning jungle recede in the distance. He pointed to the plume of black smoke billowing into the morning sky. “I reckon Wellington’s chums know we’ve been here. As will every octo on the subcontinent.”
He had a point. Sujata stationed crewmen from de Vries’s and Vi’s teams as extra eyes on the final leg of their journey to the warehouse. Vi herself stumbled onto the bridge a few hours later, looking as though she hadn’t slept since before the first octo landings in London, and smelling like she’d last bathed a year before that. Sujata took her aside while the lookouts murmured to each other and Turcotte, who had become a font of profanity as he wrestled with the half-crippled airship.
“We spent a lot of phosphorus on Jack Scaly last night,” said the weaponeer.
Sujata nodded. “We won’t have to do any more fighting. Wellington’s people are taking care of that. So open everything we have left.” She’d never seen Violet so exhausted; the captain wondered, briefly, whether it was a good idea to have her working with volatile phosphorus in this state. But they’d arrive in a few hours, winds permitting, and what choice did she have?
Vi nodded. “It’s done, captain. Just wanted to warn you that we might not have enough left for what you intend.”
“One problem at a time, Vi. Now get some sleep.”
The weaponeer nearly bumped into de Vries, who entered the bridge just as she departed.
“Let me guess,” said Sujata. “Having recalculated the tolerances for our remaining engines, you’re worried we lack the lift and maneuverability to carry out my frankly ingenious plan.”
The engineer sighed. “Yes. It was quite clever, captain. But we overlooked something. We were counting on the cavorite to augment our buoyancy. But in fact—” Here he rattled a sheaf of papers covered in his precise draftsman’s hand. There were equations, diagrams, arrows, and a rather detailed sketch of Turcotte crapping in Wellington’s hat. “—It will actually reduce the Shiva’s buoyancy.”
“What the blue blazes are you prattling on about?” She studied his eyes, wondering if he was drunk.
“The cavorite will reduce the weight of the air around us, along with the weight of our ship. By reducing that differential it reduces the buoyancy.”
“You didn’t mention this before.”
“Where the cavorite helps is with the thrust-to-weight ratio.” He rattled the papers again. “And until last night we had a comfortable margin of excess thrust.”
“You mean back when we had four engines.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“Now we don’t.”
* * *
Unmarked octo nests aside, Wellington’s map proved accurate. The Black Shiva drifted over the secret compound of T. David England & Sons around midafternoon. They found no sign of human activity in the camp, and no sign of tripods lurking in the surrounding forest. Perhaps Wellington had been true to his word and the Royal Navy had drawn their bug-eyed attention. Sujata gave the order to drop anchors and lower belaying lines. Soon the ship hovered over the steel hemisphere of the storehouse while the crew descended to swarm through the camp, only to find it abandoned.
Vi led a team into the warehouse—they didn’t waste time being discreet about the break-in—while Sujata and de Vries supervised the men and women who welded a series of iron hooks to the roof of the warehouse. The captain kept one eye on the work and the other on the inky clouds massing in the southeastern sky. They’d limped away from their tussle with Jack Scaly, and now the cyclone was catching up.
Vi emerged from the warehouse. Sujata, standing atop the shallow dome, cupped a hand around her mouth and called down, “Tell me you have good news.”
“It’s full, captain. If the markings on the crates can be trusted, they support that weasely toff’s claims.”
Sujata slapped her engineer on the back. “What’d I tell you? This is going to work.”
But Vi lingered on the loamy soil below, shuffling her feet and looking uncomfortable. “Uh. There’s more.” At the captain’s exasperated nod, she continued: “They anticipated us. The foundation isn’t wood, it’s reinforced concrete. The piles are a foot thick and go down at least a yard. We don’t have the phosphorus to burn through them. The metal shell is sunk straight into the concrete, so we can’t pluck that free, either, without several days’ work with sledges and picks.”
Sujata pushed her hat far back on her head. Beads clicked together when she ran a hand through her hair. “If we ever meet in the afterlife, Mr. T. David England,” she muttered, “you’ll know me because I’ll be the one stomping on your bollix with most singular dedication.”
De Vries shrugged. “It was a good idea, captain.”
Perhaps England and Sons had foreseen their strategy. Or perhaps they were more pragmatic, and had realized that storing vast amounts of cavorite in their warehouse would render the dome nearly weightless, thereby making it susceptible to storms and monsoon winds. Hence the reinforcements. This was probably the most solidly constructed building in all of the Raj. Trust a weasel who named himself “England” for business dealings with the Crown to be possessed of a particularly paranoid and devious mind. So they couldn’t cut the warehouse loose of its foundation. And even if they could, the concrete slab between the cavorite and the earth (where it wouldn’t benefit from the gravitational shielding) grossly outweighed the simple wooden floor they’d planned around. The Shiva would struggle to lift the damn thing even if they weren’t down two rotors.
De Vries cleared his throat, as though hoping to nudge the captain from an angry reverie. “We have to change tack,” he said.
“But stealing an entire warehouse, walls and all, it would have been … I mean, it would have looked …” The captain sighed. “They’d be telling the story in every pub and chophouse from Sumatra to São Paulo. We could have dined out on this one for the rest of our natural lives.”
“Sometimes clever is the enemy of practical.”
A gust of wind tugged at Sujata’s hat. She grabbed it before it went tumbling away. “If we use the cargo nets, we can sling them under the Shiva to compensate for the lost rotors. How quickly can you sketch out the rigging?”
De Vries produced a length of paper from a trouser pocket. “Already done.”
“I am pained by your utter lack of faith in my vision,” she said. “It borders on insubordination.”
“I think of it as anticipating the ship’s needs.”
Sujata called down to Vi, who still waited below. It took extra effort to make herself heard over the wind rustling through the surrounding forest. “Scratch it. We’ll use the cargo nets. Get those crates outside and empty them. We’re taking the cavorite, nothing else.” To the crewmen welding hooks atop the dome, she said, “Belay that welding. Get topside and lower the cargo nets. And dump the steel cable. All of it. Double time.” Then she turned back to de Vries. “Get your rigging in place.”
The engineer craned his neck, taking in first the airship bobbing a dozen fathoms overhead, and then the wildly swaying trees in the surrounding forest. She imagined Turcotte on the bridge right now, cursing a blue streak while he fought the rising wind with a crippled airship. De Vries’ frown reflected her own misgivings. But they were here now and standing on a fortune.
“We’ve come this far,” she said, as the first swollen raindrops pinged against the warehouse dome. “And we don’t have to worry about Jack Scaly, thanks to Wellington’s tars. Just wind and rain, and we’re no strangers to either.”
The reassurances sounded slightly hollow to her own ears. But there was so much money in the warehouse.
* * *
So it wasn’t until a few hours later, when the octo tripod emerged from the mountainside forest just as the crew struggled to sling the last of the sodden cargo nets under the Shiva, that Captain Sujata finally accepted that she never, ever should have agreed to this job. Jack Scaly wielded its heat ray like a carving knife and set upon the Shiva without any hint of Royal Navy encumbrance. The first beam pierced the Shiva's lifting body to vent the central hydrogen bladder; the second severed the cargo nets and sent their hard-earned prize crashing into the clearing below.
“Wellington!” she yelled, though the percussive tattoo of the guns drowned out her scream. “You thrice-damned scalawag! I’ll cut your—”
But then she plummeted through the wind and rain like an anchor weight filled with piss and rage. Tumbling toward a rapidly approaching earth strobed by lightning and incandescent streaks from phosphorus rounds, she had just a few seconds to question her choices in life.
The cargo nets hit the ground first. They burst open, spreading chunks of high-purity cavorite across the clearing. Including directly beneath Sujata. And the captain, now weighing a hundredth of what she did just seconds earlier, tumbled less like an anchor weight, less even than a wounded pigeon, and more like a feather caught in a gale.
She had plenty of time during her long, slow, and thoroughly dizzying fall to watch Vi’s guns pierce the alien tripod and set its innards ablaze. The weaponeer had kept phosphorus rounds in reserve; Sujata wondered if she’d even bothered to open any of them. She also had an unobstructed view of how the two surviving rotors swiveled back and forth to keep the Shiva centered over the clearing, taking advantage of the cavorite to render the severely damaged ship airborne. Turcotte fought like hell to compensate for the lost buoyancy, the swirling gale, and the kick from Vi’s guns. It gave the captain another idea.
Sujata had descended to within a few fathoms of the ground when the winds pushed her beyond the reach of the scattered cavorite. She tucked and rolled as her full weight reasserted itself, thereby softening her landing in the rain-sodden earth just enough to prevent broken bones.
The crew lowered anchor lines. She didn’t dare climb back up until the weather subsided; she’d had enough of rain-slick rope. So she took shelter in the warehouse to wait out the wind and rain, wondering how much of the shattered cavorite she could stick in her pockets, wondering if octos would send another tripod in their direction, and wondering how they would make the rendezvous with Wellington’s people. The storm gave her hours alone with her thoughts. Near sundown she decided that, on balance, she hated Jack Scaly even more than Wellington. If it had to come to a choice between a magnificent payday and seeing the octo menace removed from earth once and for all, she’d opt for the latter. Best of all, she knew how to get the cavorite to Wellington’s people.
Watching the gunners tear loose on Jack Scaly, and seeing how the Shiva bucked and kicked when they did, had given her the solution to their thrust problem.
While the crew patched the hole Jack Scaly had burned through their lifting envelope, Captain Sujata explained her new plan to her lieutenants. She hardly needed to remind them that the trade winds blew generally from the northeast at these latitudes. So if they could but attain sufficient altitude to catch the fastest winds, they could drift back across the subcontinent toward the heart of the Raj. And unless Wellington’s people were asleep at the switch (admittedly there was some debate about this), they’d have an eye out for the Shiva.
They’d lost half their engines and a considerable amount of hydrogen. But they had gravitational shielding and four very large guns. And so the delivery that would mark a change in humanity’s fortunes came heralded by intermittent bursts of gunfire, riding incandescent streamers that cleaved the sky.
They ran out of fuel, and ammunition, several hundred leagues from Bombay. By the time they paid for new engines along with several weeks in a shipyard, and rearmed the ship, and refueled it, the cost of their misadventure grossly outweighed any meager profits. They returned to port poorer than when they’d left.
Yet somehow the Black Shiva always held on to its letter of marque even in spite of the alliances that would, eventually, end the war.
Captain Sujata Malhotra and her crew dined out on that particular tale for the rest of their long and storied careers.