Tamsin shook herself awake and tried to blink past the overwhelming sense of bluntness she felt all over. Nothing felt broken. Nothing felt terribly wrong. She thought maybe she had bruised her thigh at most.
She was lucky. She had fallen on a great mass of rubber cables and ropes, and they had broken her fall. Some of them were surging with electricity and others were as dull and lifeless as a corpse.
Tamsin grunted softly to herself as she stood up. She began to notice tiny lights winking from the brass plated walls and the high-pitched song of machinery. No doubt she had fallen to the Difference Room—one of the lowest and most important decks on an airship. It was here that the men worked magic on their gargantuan difference machines. Tamsin had never really understood the equipment, but understood that these machines and the endless strings of numbers they spooled out were responsible for keeping air ships afloat and navigation in order.
Usually there were large cargo holds close to Difference Rooms. They were there to move equipment on and off easily. Tamsin hoped she could find one quickly and maybe pinch a parachute or steampack while she was at it. The sounds of the battle had abated, and that was bad, because it meant she had to get off the ship before Torrance’s triumphant crew found her or the victorious Roberts shot the ship out of the sky.
Adrenaline pushing her on, Tamsin rushed through the hold’s door hoping to find her exit. Instead, she only found further complications.
Five Difference Men were hunched around their equipment. Two were working with screwdrivers trying to pull apart panels and another two were hurriedly disconnecting wires and flicking brass switches in despair. The fifth, whose back was still to Tamsin, was surveying the others.
“Hurry! Hurry!” said one, “Torrance is dead! We’ve got to clean the tapes before the pirates get wind of this!”
Another said, “I still can’t believe Torrance is dead.”
“Well believe it,” said the first, “and hurry…if this falls into the wrong hands…well…Operation Turnstile is booched!”
“Quiet!” snapped the fifth man. “We’ve got company.”
Tamsin shuddered in dread as the difference men slowly turned around and faced her.
“What did she hear?” asked the first in a panic.
A new one questioned, “Who is she? Is she one of them pirates?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re all doing, and frankly, I don’t care. It sounds like my side of the fight won, and now I just want to get off this ship and meet them…okay?” Tamsin explained in the most diplomatic terms she knew.
One of the younger men laughed. “A girlie pirate…and I thought I’d seen everything!”
“Eh…she’s probably just the Captain’s wench…a little fun on the side.”
“I could use a little on the side, if you know what I mean…”
She cried venomously, “You all better get back. You better let me off this ship, or you’ll have me to answer to!”
One of the men piped up, “Lookie here, fellers…a real shot of sassy-frass.”
Tamsin blinked furiously. The man was belittling her. He was refusing to take her seriously as a warrior—as anything other than a piece of meat to devour.
“Mebbe we be nice to you—if mebbe you find the right type of persuasion…” the leader said with lechery dripping like drool from his mouth.
Tamsin began to slowly hike up her petticoats, revealing her scarlet garters and milky white thighs.
“I gotch your persuasion right here,” she mewed.
The men’s rapture turned to fear as they suddenly realized she had two neat little white leather holsters strapped to both of her thighs. With a flash, her dainty hands had found the coral handled pistols in each one, aimed the barrels at the men and pulled the triggers.
The brains of two of the men now lay splattered across the hull plating—blood and bits of flesh mixed in. A second later and two more men had collapsed. This time she had aimed for their hearts, and her victims had been left with dark circles on their chests. Red was quickly spreading from the wounds’ dark centers, chasing the blue fabric of their shirts. It looked as though the men now wore bullseyes on their chests.
Now, only the leader remained. Tamsin drew her aim left of center and blew off his hand. She smirked as his gun clanged on the iron floor. The man, once gruffly arrogant, was bent over in pain—sobbing like a little boy and clutching the bleeding stump that was once his right hand.
Tamsin returned her guns to their concealed holsters and began to strut forward, chasing the crying man backwards until he was pinned against the wall. She leapt up and grabbed hold of a pipe above her and let her body dangle for a moment. Then, she swung herself backwards and used that inertia to pull her legs up. She climbed her feet furiously up his torso, digging her spurs into his flesh with every step. Finally, she tore her left spur into his shoulder and held her right spur to his throat.
...The bullet would have hit Roberts’s chest, if not for the jerking roll his shoulder had just made. Instead it ungraciously grazed his armpit. It was the signal for the temporary peace amid the fray to end. The deck was consumed by a cacophony of shots, grunts and screams.
Roberts fell upon his right knee as he felt the blood pool out from his wound. Defying his pain, he tried to find the quartermaster with his gun, but Taylor was faster. Taylor swooped his machete across the quartermaster’s face and then fired a blunt round into his chest with the other hand.
Torrance’s face had hardened into a steel gargoyle’s mask. His saber was raised above his head and he closed in on the kneeling Roberts. With a swift swing, Torrance had disarmed Roberts of his pistol. Before he could decapitate Roberts with a backswing, however, Roberts had somersaulted out of Torrance’s way across the wooden deck floor.
As Roberts tumbled across the deck, he managed to pick up a pistol dropped by another man earlier in the fight. He turned over onto his back and held the gun above himself, pointing it madly at Torrance, who was swaggering atop him wielding that vicious blade. He squeezed the trigger and recoiled. The back-fire on the gun sent a shock wave through his arms and into his throbbing wound. But the pain stinging from his armpit was nothing compared to the look of blank horror on Torrance’s face. His eyes bulged out in recognition of death and he slumped to his knees and then backwards and then into nothingness.
“Well that was anti-climatic,” Roberts grumbled to no one but himself. He didn’t know whether to feel a surge of pride at killing such a famed hero or to feel offended that such a legend gave so poor a fight.
He glanced around the deck and saw that in less than a minute, his men had indeed overtaken the ship. The bodies of Torrance’s men laid strewn across the deck like seaweed upon a beach.
Taylor held out his hand to help his captain up. “Sir?”
“Gonna need the other hand, Taylor,” he replied, motioning to his right armpit. His white shirt was now drenched in blood seeping out from the center of the wound.
It took Roberts a moment to steady himself on his own two feet. Taylor and the rest of the men looked on at him with a bit of worry, which Roberts immediately swatted off. “I’m fine…fine.”
To show them, he arched his back and stood up tall. He centered his balance and then began to stolidly walk across the deck with the same proud strut he always used. Once the men ceased their concern, he asked Taylor, “Where’s Hanson?”
“He took three men down below to see if they could rendezvous with Tamsin and the Southerner.” Taylor never referred to Jackson Wilkes by name. He was still too sore that the crew had elected the new Southern steampacker to the position of quartermaster—a position that had previously been his.
“And we did!” Hanson’s voice whooped from below. He and his party of men were heaving a large, metal chest with pride.
The youngest of his men cried, “And we got us here the loot, too!”
“Let’s move out. Fast as you can, boys! Fast as you can!” Roberts said. A steam rat was coming to and Roberts drolly shot him dead.
Jackson came lumbering up behind Hanson’s boys. He rushed past them and grabbed at Roberts’s left elbow. “They got Tamsin. The Chinese Box had trapdoors and she fell.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, at least twelve feet. I think she’s knocked out. I called and called for her, but—”
Roberts clucked. “And your point is?”
“We can’t leave her.”
He chuckled at the new kid’s naivety. “If Tamsin needs help to survive a short little fall, then we don’t need Tamsin.”
“What about ‘No man left behind’?”
“Never took to that mode of thought. I prefer ‘No gold left behind’.”
“We can’t go! We can’t go!” Jackson cried.
Roberts slapped him cold across the face. “We’re going.”
***
***
Torrance’s young boatswain fell to the deck with a dull thud of death. Smoke danced from the bullet hole in his chest. Roberts didn’t even look at the boy. He merely cocked back his pistol and prepared to fire at the grizzled quartermaster charging his way.
“Stop!”
The voice came out of nowhere. It was clear, confident and calmly poised for action.
Torrance’s sword was suddenly holding the quartermaster back. All of Torrance’s men had paused at their captain’s command. They were conflicted, but loyal to his words. Roberts’s own crew had also stopped, but out of sheer confusion. They all looked to Roberts, who was still looking at his prey.
“But…sir!” the old sea dog clamored. “This pirate has gone and killed poor Sully. We must have his blood for that!”
Torrance quietly replied, “And that we will.”
Captain Torrance walked past his men to face Roberts. “I have to admit, I had often heard tales of The Rotter’s Rose. Even as a young man in His Majesty’s Aero Force, I had heard warnings about how we do not engage The Rotter’s Rose. We do not fight Captain Hogarth and his Rotten Rogues. It would have been easy, in those days, you know, for the Aero Force to pick off the ship. Hogarth was not a great tactician, nor was he considered a great leader of men. But, of course, you know that, don’t you? You must have been there when Vicious Stiehl killed him. You must have been part of the mutiny. You probably even voted for it.”
Roberts’s face was as blank as a slate. Not one of the Rotten Rogues could tell if Torrance’s retelling of the Mutiny of ’54 was getting under their Captain’s skin. He made no sign that he was even aware that Torrance was speaking. He only stared straight ahead with his glacier blue eyes, blinking occasionally because of the smoke.
“Hogarth had his secrets…” Torrance teased.
Roberts responded, “I’m sure.”
“But all in all, he was a good man, as I understood it.”
Torrance had somehow corralled himself and Roberts into the center of a ring of men. Roberts felt uneasy, as though he had been signed up for a boxing match he hadn’t been able to train for. Never taking his pistol’s aim off of Torrance, he quickly glanced about the circle of men. The Rotten Rogues out numbered Torrance’s men at least two to one. He saw them all staring silently. Their faces were caked with blood, oil and sweat. Taylor, one of his best men, was standing closer to the enemy’s side—a mere step away from both the quartermaster and the captain. It could be over in a matter of one second. Roberts couldn’t understand why his men didn’t act, didn’t erupt, didn’t end this wicked fight. Yet somewhere in the pit of his stomach, he did know.
He knew that they were frozen in quiet anticipation for the same reason that he could not yet shoot Torrance. The captain possessed a rare dignity. His bearing and posture and words all came together to create something that was all too rare in these war weary days: quite simply, he was a great man. He was a man who demanded honor from his enemies. Roberts’s stomach twisted in dread as he realized what Torrance was about to ask him.
“Captain Roberts,” Torrance declared, “I have heard great stories of your fearsome deeds. I understand that you were a prodigy of pain and that you have grown into a master of murder. Still, I have heard more of you. I have heard that unlike Vicious Stiehl you are a captain who takes the safety of his crew very seriously. I believe we share this quality, and so I ask you, captain to captain, man to man, that we settle this battle ourselves.”
“You’re proposing that we fight a duel and that the winner claims victory over the battle?”
Torrance assented. “Precisely. You’re telling me that you wouldn’t relish the challenge, Roberts? Matching your blade with mine?”
Roberts exhaled and chose his words very carefully as he replied. “You speak as though we were equals, and we are not. You speak as though I were like you, a man who betrayed the good captain who sheltered me in my youth for my own taste of glory. You speak as though we could possibly share respect for one another. You speak as though I were a man of my word and that you were a man of your own. You speak as though you know everything about me, and yet you don’t even know my real name.”
Torrance touched the tip of his sword with his left index finger. He looked at the blood bubbling up from the tiny pinprick with disappointment. “Well, that is a shame…” he muttered. “Here I thought we might come to an understanding. I thought perhaps we could save ourselves a lot of trouble and save many lives.”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.”
A nervous looking lad of about seventeen immediately jumped up from the middle of the vault. He placed his hands above his head and cried, “Don’t shoot! I ain’t got any weapon!”
Tamsin stepped out of the way to let Jackson finish this one. He surprised her by shooting the boy in the leg.
“What was that for?” she demanded. “You had a clear shot!”
Jackson had already walked past her and was working on picking the lock of one of the trunks in the center of the room.
The lad began to wail in pain. “Fucking Jesus Christ Mary oh my leg it agh shit God Almighty…”
He sounded like a toddler in the midst of a temper tantrum.
“Tamsin, honey, come over here,” he entreated. “I need you to help me open this chest.”
She sighed and complied. For the moment, she was distracted from the wailing boy by the hunger of her imagination. She was about to explode at the thought of what treasures were hidden inside. Chinese vaults were usually only owned by the richest of merchants and pirates. Would it be gold, cash, glittering diamonds from the coast of Africa or something more magnificent than even she, in all her powers of avarice, could imagine?
They swung the trunk open and discovered a neat cache of tiny white bits of paper bound together in small lumps by twine. Tamsin flipped through the sheets of paper in disappointment. “Why this isn’t gold!”
“They’re bonds,” Jackson said in quiet appreciation.
Tamsin gave him a questioning look.
Jackson answered, “Tamsin, this is as good as gold. Each piece of paper stands for a bar of gold in the British Treasury.”
“Yeah, but ‘stands for’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘equal’. Unless I’ve got a gold bar in my hand, I ain’t got no gold bar at all.”
Shouts came from outside the cargo hold. Jackson’s shotgun somersaulted through the air as he snapped it back in their enemies’ direction. Tamsin found herself fluttering madly across the grated floor. If only she hadn’t left her flamethrower outside!
Of course! She thought to herself. I still have my…
But she didn’t complete the thought. She couldn’t have. Not while the floor beneath her had disappeared. Not while she fell swiftly through the air and crashed into a heap on the cold metal plating fifteen feet below.
Up in the vault, Jackson turned around to find Tamsin gone. The grated floor upon which she had stood was also gone. He looked at the boy who had been in the vault that whole time. He was no longer screaming in pain. He had dragged himself to a series of levers by the wall. One of them was thrown down and his left hand was poised to pull another one. He was laughing now. It was a cruel dark laugh of fate.
“BAM!” Jackson’s shotgun thundered and smoked.
The boy was finally dead.
Jackson pivoted back to face the oncoming group of enemies alone and was relieved to see it was Hanson and about three of the other Rotten Rogues smiling in the doorway.
Tamsin was trying her best not to shiver, lest her trembling threw Jackson’s equilibrium off. She thought ruefully that Roberts had been right; she should have worn the tight denim trousers of a steampacker or a leather coat. However, as soon as Roberts told her that she would be flying with Jackson through the clouds, she had been less worried about warmth and more concerned about looking pretty. She had been defiantly set on wearing her layers of knee length petticoats. She carefully selected an embroidered vest to wear over her muslin blouse and spent hours fretting over her rouge and curls. Roberts had called her a “besotted fool”, but it didn’t matter because Jackson had said she looked pretty.
She would have still looked pretty if she hadn’t been soaked through by the clouds. Now, she looked no better than a drowned rat in goggles, dangling aimlessly from Jackson’s torso. She was ashamed by the thought of what she must look like to him now.
Jackson, however, was a steampacker, and as such was too busy reading the dials and valves on his wrists to worry about how ugly the cold girl trembling at his chest looked. His mind was now surging with temperatures and pressure percentages, the force of gravity and the pull of the wind. So many physics calculations were flying through his mind and he was quick enough to figure them all out within a second. If he was sloppy, his jittering, roaring backpack of steam could explode due to pressure or run out of helium, leaving them to death.
Jackson was doing his job, and Tamsin was bored out of her mind, waiting for their part of the battle to begin.
“Is it time yet?” Tamsin called impatiently. “I hear shots in the distance.”
He turned his attention from the pressure valves on his right sleeve to the brass watch attached to his left.
“Twenty-nine after six. Right on time.”
Tamsin almost squirmed in impatience. “Are we gonna go?”
“You still got my gun?”
“And the flamethrower and blowtorch,” Tamsin answered affirmatively. They were all tied and clipped on to the harness she was wearing, much like she was attached to his harness. She grimaced for a moment at the undue weight they placed on her shoulders. It never occurred to her that Jackson felt their weight, too, as well as hers.
“Alright, here we go,” Jackson declared.
He suddenly crouched his body forward, displacing Tamsin’s position of comfort in the process. The engines suddenly stopped their steady whirling and began to whistle furiously as Jackson upped their speed. They were no longer hovering in mid-air, but zooming quickly through space.
Jackson meandered through the sky. He randomly darted east and then west, cut the power to drop through the air and then fired his pack again to lift off into the sky. To a casual observer he was flying like a madman, but Tamsin understood what he was doing. Stealth was of the utmost importance in their little ploy and Jackson was being careful to always be flying in cloud cover. Roberts had made it clear that it was essential that she and Jackson remained unseen. While The Rotter’s Rose kept their prey occupied on their port side, she and Jackson would infiltrate the ship on the starboard side.
Jackson paused in the middle of a cumulus cloud and quieted the engines. Tamsin could hear the cries of battle much clearer now. She could make out the pops of pistols being shot, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and the cries and curses of the men at war. She sighed and smiled, feeding off of the adrenaline now surging through her veins.
“You ready?” Jackson asked.
She nodded and said, “Let’s start a riot.”
He chuckled. “Alrighty.”
With that Jackson led them cleanly through the cloud and into the maelstrom of battle. Tamsin immediately looked to their flanks, their heavens and their belows for any sign of an another steampacker who might try to snipe them down.
“All clear!” she shouted back to Jackson.
Roberts’s plan had worked. Most of the small airship’s attentions were placed on her port side. The men were scrambling to fend off the machine guns singing from The Rotter’s Rose and the boarding party that would attack from that side. The starboard side, however, was almost entirely empty. Tamsin and Jackson were to sneak in on this side.
As they swooped down towards the starboard deck, a couple of steam rats hurried to repel them. Tamsin’s stomach churned slightly as she saw the men pull out pistols and point them in her direction. She unconsciously aimed her own weapon—her flamethrower—at them and noticed a trilling laugh trickle from her throat as she pulled back the trigger. She heard their screams as the flow of fire whirled across their skin. A strange focus consumed her mind as she realized that the fight had begun. She was very much alive and she was going to stay that way.
She heard the steampack’s engines jolt down before she felt them stop. Her skin sparked like firecrackers as she felt Jackson’s hands move around her to unlatch her from his harness. She hardly had anytime to process this tiny excitement though, as more steam rats with more guns rushed from the hold.
Jackson didn’t have time to unlatch his shot gun from Tamsin’s harness. His arms wrapped around her body from behind to aim the gun. Jackson snapped back three shots and swiftly brought down three men. Tamsin, in turn, let loose her flamethrower once more to repel the remaining men charging them.
“Let’s move,” Jackson said tersely as he unclipped his gun from Tamsin.
They made their way carefully below deck, clinging to the dark walls in an effort not to be seen. No one was there, though. Most of the crew was either on the port side, dealing with flames and gunfire, or shouting from the difference and engine rooms below. Jackson led them down another deck to where the cargo hold would be.
He had placed one foot on the stairs when a guard shouted, “Oy, Stan! ‘Ere we go!”
Tamsin grinned as Jackson leaped down the rest of the stairs in a single, fluid bound. She heard his shot gun fire, a grunt, and then another round went off. By the time she had made it down the stairs, both guards were dead on the ground.
“Wow, you are good,” she admired.
He said nothing. He was kneeling by the bodies searching for keys.
Tamsin surveyed the cargo hold door. “It’s no use. There’s no lock on this side. It must be one of those Chinese box designs that opens from the inside.”
Jackson looked quickly at the steel door and saw that indeed, there was no handle or lock, but only hinges. He nodded to Tamsin, “Cut it.”
She dropped her heavy flamethrower on the floor and quickly unlatched the blowtorch from her harness. Before she fired it up, she tugged at her goggles to be sure they were tightly fastened. Jackson covered her as she burned through the inch of steel. She heard shouts and guns going off and the quick, cocking action of Jackson’s gun being consistently reloaded.
Fire billowed across the sky and adhered itself to the sails of the small airship. Shouts of distress pierced through the clouds. The steam rats were in a frenzy trying to put out the flames. If the sails burned, then they were done for. The ship would plummet to the earth as soundly as a stone. The officers, however, were possessed with a different type of tension. Frenetically, they paced the deck shouting commands and preparing for battle.
Across the chasm of clouds, Captain Arthur Asher Roberts observed the havoc securely from the starboard deck of his ship, The Rotter’s Rose. He regarded the scene with a discerning gaze, peering through his spyglass and cutting through the chaos of the moment with the type of wisdom that only came from experience.
He was quietly taking note of the number of men on the other ship ready to put up a fight. Most of the steam rats seemed occupied with either fire fighting or fear. He counted only about seven competent men on the deck. An older sky pirate—who must have been their Quartermaster—was pacing the deck and trying to guide the younger men into action. He looked stocky, confident and grizzled, and so Roberts surmised that the old dog would probably be tough to kill. The Boatswain, a spiny fellow sweating about the ropes, looked more frazzled and underfed. He was young and had likely only seen battle from afar. He would be easy to take out. There were two brawling types—likely mercenaries. The smaller, goateed one had scrambled to one of the machine guns and the larger bald one stood, grasping a mast, howling to the wind as he fired his rifle to the heavens. They could pose a challenge, Roberts thought as he smiled wryly. There were two younger men—athletic, but not burly—flanking another older man. Their pistols and gazes were set directly in contempt to The Rotter’s Rose and in loyalty to the man between them: Captain James Torrance.
“Ah ha,” Roberts said as he recognized his enemy in the spyglass. “Torrance, you old coward. Let’s see how much of that British treasury you’ve got in your holds this time.”
Torrance had once been the pride of Her Majesty’s Aero Force, and had received numerous medals and accolades for his bravery in the Great London Blitzes of the 1940’s and 1950’s. But as recent years rolled around, Torrance discovered that he had aged into a spiteful and embittered man. He was tired of risking his life in the skies when the nobleman below sat miserly upon heaps of treasury funds. Greed and disillusionment had overtaken Torrance and in a stunning show of betrayal, he had killed a treasury officer and stolen his portmanteau, and with it records of every secret cache of British wealth in the entire world.
Roberts expected such duplicity from that breed of sky dog, who, like him, had been lost by his homeland at a young age. It was all well and good to live only for yourself, but if you had spent as much of your life as Torrance had in the service of something greater, you had best never do it wrong. He saw Torrance as a traitor, and as such, decided that he deserved neither the mercy nor respect he may have shown any other pirate captain.
Roberts was going to relish destroying this famed fighter of the skies.
“Captain Roberts,” a woman’s voice chirped from about thirty feet above him. He didn’t need to look up to know it was Winifred “Fred” Bailey, his best lookout, addressing him.
“Aye, Fred? What’s troubling you?”
She answered back, her Australian accent quivering with anxiety, “Well, you just said it was Torrance. If that’s true, then those roughnecks on board are likely to be former British soldiers.”
He glanced up. “And your point?”
“They may not be as spirited as Confederates or as organized as Nazis, but they’ll be just as hard to kill. Are you sure it’s worth the loss of men? They may not even have any gold.”
“As long as Wilkes and Tamsin do what’s planned, I have no doubt that we have the edge on them.”
“But they could have more soldiers hidden below deck, and can you really expect Hanson to be prepared for that? Not to mention what Torrance likely has to offer?”
Roberts considered Fred’s words. She had a tendency to be a worry worm, but her arguments were usually sound. He though about his options and then grinned up at her as he made his decision. “Then it looks like I’ll be leading the boarding party. I have a mind to learn how Torrance lives up to his reputation.”
Fred groaned as she watched her Captain saunter to where the boarding party was preparing their ranks. To the casual observer, he looked too pretty, too preened, too polished to be a ruthless cutthroat. His ebony locks were always smoothed back and glistened with pomade. His pale face was hairless save for his eyebrows and carefully tended sideburns. He was a handsome man, at least that’s what Fred had heard other women say about him, but she had never noticed. Something about his cold blue eyes or broken nose had left her feeling vacant. He had no piercings, no peg leg, and no parrot chirping one-liners on his shoulder. He wore only the best cut suits and his waistcoats were made from the most colorful Chinese silks. In fact, he was never seen without a waistcoat. Even when he dashed off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to fight, his waistcoat stayed on. Unbuttoned, but still on. Despite these trappings of gentility, he was a pirate through and through. He was a natural leader of men, a determined con artist, lucky gambler, ace shot and former boxing champion of the greater Brixton rings. His one weakness was perhaps his pride, and his sheer determination in the face of impossible odds. Fred realized in retrospect that by mentioning Torrance’s strength as fighter, she had only baited the beast within her Captain.
