Victor awoke to the sound of yelling. Nearly rolling off of the bench, he pushed himself into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes. He was relieved to see that Elizabeth had returned, but the frightened expression he saw flicker across her face when she noticed he was awake erased that relief in an instant. Outside, he could hear someone run down the central corridor towards the front of the ship. Nervously running a hand through his hair, he straightened his tie before standing up and clearing his throat.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.
Elizabeth shook her head. “A steward came and told us to stay in our cabin and keep the door closed, but that was all I was told.”
Victor nodded slowly. This was not good. Passengers would only be confined to their cabins if something was going horribly, horribly wrong. The crew might have found a puncture in the hull. They could be headed towards a slow descent into the ocean. Granted, they were flying over land, so that was unlikely to happen unless whoever was steering had been helping themselves to the drinks on the food cart. Even so, they might have to make an emergency landing in a bad part of the country. Since a rescue would take hours and the zeppelin would be impossible to repair so far away from a port they would undoubtedly have to cancel vacation, making that the worst possible outcome he could imagine.
Alternatively, the crew could have discovered an armed stowaway who was currently holding one of the other passengers hostage in an adjacent cabin. Any minute now a bullet could burst through one of the walls and hit him. Or Elizabeth, which would be a bad thing, of course. Unless, of course, the stowaway was armed with a sword or knife, which would be incredibly foolish considering all of the crew members he had seen so far were carrying pistols. He had refrained from pointing this out to Elizabeth because he knew how much she hated any type of firearm, but maybe now she would derive some comfort from that information. There was a chance it would only make her more nervous, so he kept it to himself. No sense in making his sister hysterical and adding to the chaos.
Unfortunately, he had no idea what else he
could do. He trusted the crew to do their part to handle whatever situation had come up without his feeble attempts at assistance. Unless they needed him to read a map, he would be useless to them. The best possible course of action was to stay here, do what the stewards said, and stay calm for his sister.
So, naturally, he threw up all over the carpet.
Elizabeth groaned. “Of all the times to get airsick, Victor, you choose
now? We’ve been flying comfortably for two hours, but you choose
this exact moment to throw up?”
Victor’s retort was cut off as the door burst open and a tall man with a mustache burst in. The captain. Victor had spoken with him briefly on the platform—one of the perks of being an hour early for the flight. Then the captain had looked at ease and confident, but now he had a frightened, crazy look in his eye. His pistol was no longer hanging at his hip, but clutched in his hand, the hammer already pulled back in preparation to fire. With a shaking hand, he produced his keys.
“You’ll be locked in, you’ll be safe,” he muttered as he tried to put the key in the keyhole. “There’s no cause for alarm, no cause at all.”
Elizabeth rushed towards him. “Captain! What’s going on? Why are you locking us in here?”
He looked at her as if just noticing her for the first time, then shook his head. “There’s no cause for alarm, miss. You’ll be safe in here, I assure you.”
With that, he closed the door and turned the key in the keyhole, locking Victor in with his sister and a discolored spot on the carpet in front of him. Elizabeth stared at the door helplessly for a moment before quietly sitting back down on her bench and picking up the book she had dropped on the floor in her rush to speak to the captain. The calmness with which she continued to read from it spoke volumes to Victor of how scared she actually was. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he sat down as well and pulled his bag out from under the bench. There was nothing inside it that could help him, but he gained some comfort from having it sitting on his lap.
Since the captain had his pistol out and ready to fire, Victor had deduced that they were under attack either from within or without. He had heard neither shots nor clashing blades in the corridor, only shouting and worried voices. An infant was crying in one of the cabins. Without a window, he was unable to see what could be posing a problem outside, but he was able to guess easily enough: pirates.
Like their original sea-faring ancestors and the highwaymen that roamed the land, sky pirates were by all accounts unpleasant. Whether they boarded an airship and robbed the passengers or simply brought the ship down and picked what valuables they could find out of the remains, Victor had yet to hear of an encounter with sky pirates ending well for any innocent travelers. Damage was usually done to a targeted vessel during the boarding process that left it crippled and unable to fly very far, often with disastrous consequences for those on board. If they were in fact under attack by pirates, there was very little that could be done to help them. He had to keep his trust in the crew to be able to repel an attack and convince the pirates they were better off leaving the
Bullfinch well enough alone.
Moments after this thought crossed his mind, the first shot was fired. It came from just up the outer corridor, and Victor hoped it was just one of the crewmen firing a warning shot at the approaching ship through an opened window. The following volley of shots and the sound of breaking glass quickly trivialized the issue; a full-on firefight had begun between the two ships. Outside in the corridor he could hear lead rounds slamming into the wood of the cabin walls; a loud splintering noise preceded one piercing through the wall of their own cabin, hurtling past Victor’s face to embed itself in the door.
The next few moments were hazy. Victor was vaguely aware of screaming something to Elizabeth before he threw himself onto the floor, grabbing her hand and dragging her down with him. Soon after, he remembered hearing cannon fire and screams following the sound of splintering wood in the cabin ahead of them. Clearly, their attackers were not concerned in the slightest with the possible damage they could be doing to the ship. They probably belonged to category that wrecked ships and searched the crash site for the deceased crew’s valuables. So he waited on the floor as shots were exchanged for what seemed like an eternity for the next artillery shell to
But no more cannons were fired. Victor could hear plenty of rifle and pistol fire, but the resounding boom of the cannon did not repeat. Perhaps the pirates had realized that their target had no heavy weapons and were giving them a fighting chance. Or, more likely, they were merely toying with the crew of the
Bullfinch, throwing it in their faces that they could have easily torn the ship apart, but were content to run them out of ammunition before boarding and taking what they wanted.
When the first savage yell cut through the air in the corridor outside, Victor knew they’d been boarded. Without thinking, he pushed himself into a sitting position and pressed his back against the door, pushing with all his might and willing it to stay closed. He knew it was already locked, but he felt as though he had to do
something. An added security measure never hurt, after all, though he became uneasy when Elizabeth joined him in trying to hold the door shut against the pirates. The bullet hole up above their heads from the round that pierced the outer wall was more than enough evidence that she could be shot through the door.
Of course, he need not have worried. In fact, neither of them need have worried about the door; the wall ahead of them that separated their cabin from the outer corridor suddenly exploded inwards, one of the crewmen landing at their feet. Through the hole stepped one of the largest men Victor had ever seen, the top of his head scraping the ceiling of the cabin. He was leering at the both of them through a thick brown beard, one of his hands clenched in a bloody fist. The crewman’s face was a bloody mess, barely recognizable as a person at all.
“Pretty cheap wood don’ ye think, missy?” the pirate sneered, his eyes fixed on Elizabeth.
Victor opened his mouth to shout something demeaning at him—or, more likely, scream—but the deafening retort of a gun drowned him out. The large man wobbled on his feet unsteadily for a brief moment before falling backwards, still grinning. Victor looked over at Elizabeth and was astonished to find her holding the crewman’s pistol, the barrel still smoking in her hands. She dropped it as if it had suddenly become incredibly hot and kicked it away before pushing herself into the corner. The horrified expression on her face perfectly captured what he himself was feeling, despite knowing full well that she had probably just saved their lives.
In the next cabin over they could hear the sound of a struggle, but Victor’s thoughts were preoccupied with the large hole in the wall ahead of them. If they moved away from the door someone might be able to get in that way, but anyone passing by their cabin on the outer corridor would be able to see them unless they hid. No matter what they did, they would eventually be found by the pirates and robbed, raped, or killed, maybe even all three. He only hoped they started with the killing first.
“The parachutes,” Elizabeth said suddenly.
Crawling over to her bench, she started looking around underneath, finally pulling out a large, tight bundle of grey fabric with straps for her shoulders. Pulling out another, she tossed it over to Victor before slipping her arms through the straps of her own. Victor merely stared at her until she turned around.
“Are you insane? Where are we going to jump from? If we run down the hallway, we’ll be shot for sure. Even if we do make it out the door, what if the parachutes don’t open? Where will we go when we land? We don’t even know where we are right now!” The rest of his rant was cut off as she crossed the room, pulled him to his feet, and slapped him across the face. “What the hell was that for?!”
“We can either wait around in this cabin to die, or we can at least
try to get off of this ship alive. If you want to stay here with the pirates, be my guest, but so help me if mother blames it on me I will have a psychic summon your ghost and trap it in a spittoon!” Elizabeth snapped.
She darted out of the cabin through the hole in the wall before Victor could stop her. He hesitated only a moment before putting his own parachute on, picking up his bag, and following her out. Three dead crewmen were lying in the hallway, two slumped against the wall and one hanging halfway out a broken window. Elizabeth had not gone far; she was standing at the precipice of the hole the cannon had made in the side of the gondola, which was surprisingly large; Victor refrained from turning around to see what it had done to the occupants of the room behind them. Staring down at the fields far below, she gave him a nervous look before gripping the straps of her parachute and taking a step forward towards the hole. A powerful arm wrapped around Victor’s neck out of the blue, pulling him back away from the hole while the hot muzzle of a flintlock pressed into his forehead.
“I wouldn’t do that, girl,” a voice growled near Victor’s ear.
Elizabeth stopped in her tracks and backed away from the hole. Immediately, three men grabbed her from behind, tearing the parachute from her back. She fought back, kicking at them and biting at their hands until one of them hit her over the head with the butt of his pistol, cowing her considerably if not simply knocking her out. One of them started to laugh until a quiet “tsk” silenced him. Somewhere behind him, Victor could hear the speaker clucking his tongue as if he were scolding a child.
“Hitting a woman is a terrible crime, my friend. I do not believe the captain wanted you handling the passengers so roughly.”
One of the men holding Elizabeth snarled. “Th’ cap’n didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout how we handle the passengers. We was only told t’ take anythin’ what looked valuable.” He grinned at Elizabeth. “She looks pretty damn pricey t’ me.”
“Enough!” the other man snapped. He had a strange accent Victor could not place; he wished he could turn around and see the speaker that seemed to be trying to help his sister. “I am thinking that, of the five of us here—these two not included—I would be the one who knows best when it comes to the captain. Or are you moved to disagree with me, my friend?”
The other man spat on the floor. “I ain’ yer friend, ye knifey little shit.”
In response, the man with the accent clucked his tongue again. An instant later, a knife was protruding from the other pirate’s neck, his blood running all over Elizabeth’s hair and blouse. She fell with him as he sank to the ground gurgling curses through the blood. The other two stared dumbly at their fallen friend as Elizabeth darted to her feet, jolted to her senses by the warm, wet blood clinging to her with her hair. She looked at Victor, and he assumed her own frightened expression was reflected quite well on his own face. He had a pistol digging into his temple, and the arm around his throat had not loosened in the slightest.
“Such a shame,” the man with the accent sighed. “He was a good man. Probably. Well, probably not, but you understand what I mean, yes? No matter. You three may take these ones to the captain. They have much to answer for, I think.”
Topic: Sailing the Seven Skies (Read 5409 times)