The gunship banked hard, and we all held on tight to hold our seats. The Tsar hadn't strapped himself in and struggled to remain in the observer's chair. I hadn't either, but had much less difficulty due to finely engineered reflexes. I was pressed back into the seat as Frank pitched us nearly vertical. "Full lift," he called through clenched teeth. I slammed a lever forward, and the seat shoved hard into my back as we rocketed skyward.
"OK, cut it!"
Everything went into free fall as he performed a maneuver that flipped the world end for end. I would have never thought the gunship was this maneuverable. Frank was honestly a wizard. I had been pleasantly happy with my own talent at operating an air machine, but
I had been programmed with by-the-book skills, and Frank did things with an air machine that their designers hadn't intended. I was shoved to the side and back as we went into a banking turn.
Frank was looking out the side window towards something down below. "Why aren't we firing?" he yelled over his shoulder, "Get them firing!" Corporal Sienkiewicz had been assigned as gun captain for the port turret, but he was injured. “We don't have the crew for more than one on a side,” Private Pryonski called.
Frank bit off a curse.
"Sergeant,” Colonel Mazur called back. “Can you help out?"
Piotr was there at my elbow, holding onto handholds and swaying like a seasoned pro.
"I'll take over your station."
"Hang on!" Frank called, then threw us into another turn in the opposite direction. As soon as we were stable in a continuous bank, I jumped out of my seat and dodged past Piotr to get to the cockpit door.
"Tell me when you're ready!" Frank called to Piotr as I left the compartment and moved down the corridor.
"I’m going portside!" I called back to the cockpit, and distantly over the roar of the engines, I heard Frank respond, "Port! Portside! I'm going to come back around!"
The portside forward gun turret was close by. I popped the hatch open and crammed myself inside. Two of our Polish crew were there. One of them was working the handles, trying to aim the weapon. The turret was little more than an open gun port with a cannon sticking out. Even the crewmen on ironclads had better protection than this.
"Oh, thank Our Lady, Sergeant!” the first one called. He was hanging on for dear life with a clip full of cannon shells under one arm. It had to be heavy, but he was a muscular chap. "I'm just the loader, we need help!”
“I'm the gunner's mate!" called the guy in the gunner’s seat.
"Relieving you!” I shouted, and he slid out of the seat and swung aside. With only the smallest twinge of headache, the skills I needed dropped into place in my mind. I slipped into the seat and grabbed both handles.
A moment later, my arms blurred as I spun the gun turret on target. We were still aimed straight up into the inky sky, but something inside me told me which way I needed to be pointed to be on target when we rolled back the other way.
The thought gave me a twinge of pain and a momentary disorientation. I realized that was my aircraft piloting skills slotting into place with generic gun crew skills. This autocannon was a naval design, and the skills to aim it had to work in harmony with aerial maneuvering. By now, slotting skills together in my mind caused me barely a twinge.
Light swirled into view as Frank slewed us back around. Below us was a walking gunship, a stubby little gunboat with two large caliber guns for an aft and a slew of smaller weapons. It was an old style pre-dreadnought craft where the guns weren’t not in fully enclosed turrets but open on the deck with little more than blast shields for the crew manning them. It wasn’t flying; I couldn’t make them out, but that kind of ship had legs.
More headache; apparently those geeks in Prague had loaded in catalogs of different vehicles into my memory, letting me understand pretty well what kind of capacity my target had. Apparently, this walking boat had been built out of an obsolete costal monitor.
The ship pitched oddly. Spotlights waved around the ground below it, making the sight particularly surreal. The hull and lower parts of the ship were in shadow, with all the spotlights mounted topside. Where they shone off to the sides, they flashed across treetops, roads, and farmhouses. The ship pitched crazily as it moved across the landscape.
The earlier shot was fired from a rifle, which was loaded with a round of gas. From what I knew, the gunboat must be supported by a colossal set of legs. Two or four I didn't know, but they certainly didn't hold the craft steady. That probably meant only two legs. More Baba Yaga tech. How could they aim at all?
Even as I wondered, a Maxim gun sprayed bullets into the air. I stopped gawking and got to work. Elevation and traversal handles blurred as I swung the gun around and lined it up. The target was weaving and bobbing and we were slicing crazy patterns through the air, so everything was a momentary target.
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As soon as my programmed instincts told me I was coming to bear, I shifted hand to the firing lever. Boom! Then it was back to adjusting while the crew behind me slammed another shell into place.
"What kind of shells are these?"
"Armor-piercing, I think,” the loader answered.
“Do we have high explosives?"
"Yeah, hang on." The loader moved away. "I think it's these," he said as he reappeared.
The weapon was loaded with a clip of 3 shells, but each one was cycled with a manual working of the action. The gunner's mate cycled the action to get the spent shell out and another one rammed home. Every three shots he helped the loader slot in another clip of shells. Those were the bronze brackets holding the butt ends of the shells in a tight trio. The spent clip fell away, clanging off the deck along with the spent shells, and my crew slammed the next clip into place. Chunk, thunk, the machinery worked and then the gunner's mate jumped back.
The speaker in the corner chirped and then squealed. "Hang on, we're going around for another pass."
The machine gun down below was firing again, but Frank corkscrewed us away. I leaned forward and tried to get a good look outside as we turned around. Fortunately, this body didn't seem prone to vertigo because the crazy flashing of distant artificial lights and stars in the sky would have been debilitating. As we came around I saw a massive fire far in the distance that I was pretty sure was the shipyard Hannah and Angelica had gone after. The fire was getting growing by the minute.
The intercom squealed again. "Sergeant, the colonel says he sees Team One to the north. Can you spot them?"
That was Hannah and Angelica. I was having a hard time figuring out direction with my only point of reference being the burning shipyard. "Tell him no," I told the loader. "If you know how to work the intercom. No, wait!" Far in the distance a point of light flared to life, a parachute flare drifting down. It revealed an area of trees and a stretch of dirt road. I could make out moving figures on it for a moment. For an instant they looked human, but then I realized just how far off we were. They were actually a pair of mechs. Our mechs.
"No wait, I see them! Somebody's got them illuminated. Let the bridge know.”
"Oh, hang on!" The loader called. The intercom squealed again as he yelled into it.
This time the colonel answered, "Yes, I see them. Hang on tight, we're making another pass on the ship."
Was it a ship? It looked more like a gunboat to me. Was there actually a difference? I know my cousin who had been in the Navy always whined if people used those words wrong. Me, I didn't really care. If it floated in the water it was a boat. Unless I felt like calling it a ship. This thing had legs, which made it… I dunno. Fucking stupid.
The illuminated mechs swung away as we banked around again. I leaned forward in my seat to try to get a look in our direction of travel, but couldn't see much before we banked again. The gunboat swam into view as we came back at it. We were swinging around it in an tightening arc, so the range to target was continuously changing. My pre-programmed skills didn't care. The handles spun and I got my sights lined up again. Boom, adjust, boom, adjust, adjust, boom.
“Reload more high explosive!”
My second shot hit the railing of the ship and scattered crewmen and my final shot obliterated the machine gun crew that had been firing at us. There was another gun further aft on the deck and men were swarming about that one too. “Come on, come on, come on, reload,” I snapped, and my loader clunked another clip into place.
We were getting close now. Tracer fire came up to meet us from the aft machine gun. "Okay, ready!" the gunner's mate shouted as he slammed the action closed. He leapt back as I spun the handles and brought the weapon back to bear. But before I could fire, a dark shadow passed across in front of us. Flames blossomed on the deck and the shadow disappeared again.
It was an air mech. Tamara or Anastasia, I couldn't tell in the dark. Hopefully Anastasia had gotten to her mech. The bonded riders had an innate sense of where their machine was at all times, so when separated, they had little difficulty getting back to their machine. We had left her on the side of the canal some time ago. Hopefully she had recovered her weaponry.
One of the main guns on the walking boat fired. The muzzle flash lit up the night, throwing stark shadows in a spiderweb in all directions for an instant. The muzzle blast hit me in the face like an enthusiastic pillow fight. My ears popped.
"Holy Mary Mother of --!" one of my crew called, followed by some light blasphemy. “What are they shooting at?”
“Two guesses,” I said through gritted teeth, “and the first one doesn't count.”
As we swung around again, I got a brief glimpse of the area. The flare was burning low, and I couldn't see the girls' mechs. A fire burned in the woods nearby. I didn't think it was where they had been, but all I had to go off of was the position of the dirt road and the flickering flare illuminating the area. "Holy shit!" The intercom was busy with yelling. The second gun crew was up and running on the starboard side, and the colonel was ordering them to relocate to port.
"Tell 'em ‘no’," I called back. "We'll move to the aft starboard gun. Tell 'em quick" I jumped out of the seat.
The gunner's mate gave me a bewildered look. I sighed. Didn’t these privates know you don’t ask sergeants why they give the orders? "Come on, stick close. Let's get moving. We need all of our firepower on one side if we're going to take this thing down."
The loader was yelling into the intercom. Hopefully he got our point across. Otherwise we'd no manned guns at all facing the enemy when Frank attacked from the wrong direction.
I cracked the hatch and climbed out into the main corridor. We were bounced back and forth against the walls as we worked our way toward the rear. I blessed whatever engineer had thought to install handholds at regular intervals and to adjust them in such a way that you didn't keep bashing into them. Their partially recessed design made it easy to move from one to the next as we weaved our way down the corridor.
"Oh shit!" the loader swore as he lost his footing when we made a particularly violent maneuver. He slid forward into the legs of the gunner's mate. I planted my boot in the middle of the corridor and lifted my other to jam it against the far wall. The loader came up against my grounded leg and stopped. I held myself, braced with a foot on one wall and an arm on the other, while I held both of the men in place. They used me as a lifeline for a moment. When the maneuver ended, they scrambled up and grabbed handholds.
“Thanks, Sarge!”
“Come on,” I growled. “Move your asses!”