Enter the Lightning

I swung out again. My gun fouled in the War Wing’s rigging, but I must have jarred him. Instead of slicing through me his axe sliced through the rung I stood on. I hung by my elbow, gun caught in braided yak hair and yellow ribbons. I flailed, kicking the rider in the face and gaining the next rung.

I scrambled up the ladder, leaving the useless gun and drawing my sword. The rider grabbed the ladder and came after me, but the rising storm wind caught in his wings. He was pulled east, taking the ladder and me with him. My feet slipped off; the fall jerked my arms and I hung, legs thrashing. I struggled to regain my footing, but the rope ladder was nearly horizontal as the Wing pulled us. He gained another rung, then another while I flailed. The wind whipped us both around and I managed to shove a foot through the rungs, then onto the next one.

The Mongol rider pulled a gleaming horn handle on his chest and his War Wing apparatus spun off free into the wind. The ladder answered to gravity again, and the rider was coming, axe waving, war cry bellowing. I’ve no idea how to fight sword against axe, no idea at all. I squatted down on the rung on which I was perched, and sliced off the rope ladder just below my feet. The war cry ended in a shout of surprise, and he was gone. I scrambled back into the airship.

I clapped Chef on the arm. “Well done, sir, good throw!”

“Oui, oui, mais ce que le singe?”

I looked where he was pointing. A grey-blue balloon floated in the darkening sky above us. I recognized it at once. The boiler crew had taken it from Mein Herr’s laboratory, and it meant destruction for us all. Hanging from the balloon was Herr von Hedwig’s Ball Lightning Generator.

I had myself prepared the device for launch in the anxious hours before we reached Pekin. But it was to keep myself busy, not from any intention to blow us all to Hell deploying it. It was uncontrollable and unpredictable – an experiment. Most of the lightning it generated fizzled out within a few yards, but occasionally the damn thing blew itself up. This one was the seventh we’d built, and had never been tested.

I stared, calculating. The Schöneluft was gaining altitude on the Khan’s airship. We would be even with her soon, but War Wings still leapt from the fighting platform to pepper our hull with flaming shrapnel. If they reached a gasbag inside the ship not even the Grandmothers’ secret formula could keep us from following the U.S.S. Lincoln to a fiery death.

I could either fight the attackers, or race up to the lab and reel the Lightening Generator back on board. If the boiler crew had activated the Generator, I didn’t want it back on board.

I ran to a speaking tube a few yards away and blew the emergency signal.

“Holen Sie uns hier raus! Get us out of here!”

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Photo by Scotto Bear from North Beach, MD, USA (051231_sun) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons