The ship thrummed in the night, undershot by a deep whine that could shiver the bones from your body. Walt flipped on the burner, maintaining altitude, but he could still feel the noise in his ribs, sharp as an icepick and chthonic as a cavefish. Otto retreated from the basket's edge to hunker down and swab mist from the lenses of his binoculars.
"It's dank as a submarine's basement."
Walt glanced over the side. "Anything?"
"All the clouds you could ever want to wear."
"Keep looking. If we're going to get splashed across its side, I'd like a moment to curse a few people first."
Otto shook his head, mumbling, and scooted back to the basket's side, where he nudged his chin past the wicker edge and clamped the binoculars to his eyes. "We even close?"
"Getting there. I'm about to start easing us down. Try not to piss yourself."
"This mist, you couldn't even tell."
Walt kept one hand on the vent's control line, trying to feel a descent he couldn't see. Between the cold and the clouds sucking up the heat, he doubted he'd need the vent at all. A minute later, he waggled his jaw, popping his ears.
"See anything?" he said.
"Nothing count?"
"Nothing is something."
"Then I see something."
"Good."
He continued to let the balloon sink of its own accord. They were higher than the ship, he knew that much. He thought they were on top of it—it was a big enough landing zone, that was for sure, and the droning, penetrating hum of its engines and systems sounded more or less straight down, which was something. A something a lot like Otto's, maybe, considering that maneuvering a balloon that's the passive reactant to heat and winds is clumsy in the best of circumstances, let alone when you can't see a damn thing, you're probably fifty pounds past your recommended weight limit, and the continuing existence of humanity is at stake—but still. Something.
His ears popped again. He glanced over the side, saw nothing but darkness and swirling particles of water. He could definitively feel their descent now. He reached for the burner to slow their fall.
Otto craned over the edge, too excited to remember to be afraid. "I got something!"
"What kind of something?"
"Oh, I think you probably ought to take a look for—"
The basket whammed into solid metal, throwing Walt against the covered bundles of C-4. He struggled to his feet, hip and knee stinging. The balloon's envelope sagged downward, pulling sideways, scraping the wicker basket over the solid metal beneath.
And to all sides, too, a flat stretch that quickly disappeared into the mist. Not much question of where they were. Not unless somebody had just replaced the ocean with a million billion tons of black metal.
The basket skidded over the hull. Walt heaved bundles of explosives over the side. They landed on the ship with muffled thumps. Otto shook himself and pitched in. A sudden gust yanked the basket hard. Walt glanced up at the bobbing envelope. He'd intended to deflate it, reduce the risk of it falling past a window, but there was no time. He vaulted over the basket's edge. His feet hit, sliding on the rain-slick metal. His elbows banged into the hull. He clawed and scrabbled and then there was nothing beneath him but mist and open air.
He dangled from a smooth metal bar, legs penduluming in the gap. The balloon skittered away, sinking behind a drop in the ship's hull. Walt strained his arms, lifting one elbow onto the slippery surface, but his other hand slipped loose, dangling him from one awkward wing.
A rough, heavy hand grabbed his upper arm. Another took hold of his collar. Otto hauled him bodily to solid ground. Behind him, a rift yawned across the deck.
"You son of a bitch," Otto panted. "You trying to leave me all alone up here?"
"Just impatient to get inside."
"Well, on your feet, then. We got a bread trail to follow."
The hull extended to all corners of the compass, a flat black range interrupted without earthly reason by open gaps and fat, ten-foot-high triangles that may have housed delicate equipment or may have been bolted on just to look scary as hell. Not that there were any visible bolts. There were hardly any seams, either, as if the whole goddamn half-mile vessel had been poured into a single mold. Otto stooped for a cloud-sodden canvas bundle of C-4. Another rested in the gloom twenty feet on. They found five of the six packages and spent fruitless minutes circling for the last before Otto pulled up and gazed over the metallic horizon.
"We could spend all day up here, kid. What we've got will either dunk this bird or it won't."
Walt tapped his toe against the solid hull. "Having my doubts on that front."
"Yeah, well, that ain't all we got in store for these assholes, is it?"
"I've got my doubts about that one, too. Any clue which way the engines are?"
"Figure we walk far enough in one direction, we'll learn soon enough."
The ship vrummed up through the soles of his shoes. He saw no windows or portals of any kind. A blustery wind came and went, misting his jeans and jacket. He would have said it felt like the surface of the moon, but as far as he knew the moon didn't make a rubbery clank if you stepped down too hard. Moonside visibility wasn't restricted to thirty feet in front of you, either. They shuffled forward, skirting the holes and unclimbable rises. Massive cupolas cast blue towers of light into the skies, spaced widely enough to leave whole sections in near-total darkness.
The wail of an incoming flier cut over the ship's organ-rattling hum. Walt shrunk against a house-sized black block. His fingers were stiff with cold; he kept one hand in his pocket for warmth while keeping the other out to ward against falls, switching them every few minutes. After a while, his mind gave up any notion of trying to make sense of where he was or what he was doing, settling into an alert blankness. He walked.
Without warning, he stood on the edge of a steep downward arc. Beaded mist trickled down the slope.
"Fifty/fifty," Otto said, jerking his chin right and left. "Bet you that's the best odds we see from here on out."
Walt cupped his hand over one ear, then the other. "I can't tell."
"Well, don't look at me to hear the way. I've logged a few thousand too many hours behind a black powder pistol."
"Okay." It felt and sounded like there were engines to all sides, but in another sense, that made his choice all the easier, because what did it matter if he was wrong? "I never much liked the left, anyway."
Walt started right, skirting the abrupt curve into blackness. The going was smoother along the rim, less fraught with sudden pits, but the clouds stopped him from any sense of how far they'd gone and how much might remain. One step after another, rubber squeaking on metal. They stopped to catch their breath and sip bottles of water. They hadn't brought any food. Walt hadn't expected to eat again, and he began to regret he hadn't taken along what would once have been a simple treat, a bag of M&Ms or a Peanut Butter Cup, as a sugary memento of everything that had been lost. He could have sat down on the hull with it and eaten it and for a moment he wouldn't have felt so cold or forlorn.
He carried on. A steep ridge peaked from the surface, forcing them inland. Had he already seen that trio of bulges off to the right? The ship was circular; could they have already have completed a full revolution?
The hull's thrumming swelled. Ahead, the mist glowed like moonlight. The steep curve led down to round nozzles jutting from the ship's side, monstrously wide, steam boiling in their glaring light. Walt laughed.
"Those things are volcanoes. We'd need to be supervillains to take them down."
Otto swabbed moisture from his brow. "I know a crank like you's popped a balloon or two in his day. You put a crack in the side of something that big and nasty, it'll do the rest of the work for you."
"Balloons," Walt said. "Thanks for putting it in a language I can understand."
He walked on. Once the first engine was directly downslope, Walt stepped out of his shoes and lined them neatly on the edge. He unshouldered his pack, unzipped
his coat, peeled off his shirt.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Walt squeaked his bare foot against the damp metal. "If I start to slip, my skin's going to stick to this a lot better than my clothes."
He dropped his pants and, down to his threadbare black jockey shorts, laced his shoes back on; his clothes might not have much stick, but against the wet surface, his rubber soles clung like a terrorized cat. Otto knotted the slender rope. Walt slid it over his shoulders and tightened it around his waist. The cord was light, thinner than his pinky.
"If I slip, this thing is just going to tear me in half, isn't it?"
"Naw." Otto gestured at the featureless metal plain, void of anything to hitch the other end of the rope to. "You fall hard enough to do that, you'll just pull me right off the edge." He plunked down. "Good thing I'm fat."
Walt emptied his pack of everything but a heavy bundle of C-4. "Just slap it right on?"
"Just slap it right on."
"If anything goes wrong..."
"Yup."
Walt exhaled and lowered himself to the surface. It was witheringly cold, a sharp metal bite against his skin. He crawled feetfirst down the slope, lowering himself on his side whenever he threatened to slip, stabilizing himself with the full surface area of his arm and side and legs and shoes. He could support his own weight until halfway down the curving slope. Welcome warmth rose from the engines. The rope strained around his hips. As the hull steepened, he slid down on his butt until it bumped against his heels, then lay flat and stretched down his legs for another scoot. It was exhausting and freezing and painful and slow, but it worked, and he wormed his way down, two feet at a time, until he stood on top of the giant nozzle's base, heat rolling over him in drowsy waves. He unwrapped the explosives and mashed the white, clay-like material into the crease where the engine protruded from the hull. Once his hands were halfway warm, he started the climb back up.
"Get it?" Otto said when he emerged minutes later.
"Got it."
"Wish someone could see this," the old man grinned. "Doesn't much matter, I suppose. Homer himself wouldn't have words."
Walt caught his breath, then jogged in place until the feeling returned to his hands and knees. The remaining engines were a monotony of scooting down cold, clammy metal. When he finally finished, he flopped down on the hull, his ribs swelling like a landed dolphin's. Otto draped his clothes and jacket over him. His hands and shoulderblades burned where the skin had rubbed away. His toes were soaked and stiff and his left pinky toe pulsed like it might be broken. His head was too heavy to lift from the metal.
"You got it in you?" Otto said softly some minutes later. "I can head in myself. Leave you with the detonators."
The very question brought him back, marshaling his anger, his defiance, his existential need for revenge. Within a minute, he was sitting upright. He stood to put back on his clothes. They were nearly as clammy as his skin, but the leather jacket felt like steel mail on his shoulders.
"Waiting on you," he croaked.
Otto's groundside sketches of the ship made it easy business to reach the metal spire that marked the spot below which the landing bay doors took in and let out the jets, fliers, and dropships. Walt expected another grueling descent from the top of the hull to the bays, but Otto's crude maps didn't show the spiral ladder that led straight down to a platform clinging to the ship's dark side. They got out their pistols and entered a manual door. The well-lit tunnel led to a scaffold high inside the quiet bays. Below, landing strips led out to the cold and misty air. They huddled on the scaffold, watching. Walt didn't know the time—2 AM, 5—but the bays were empty as a midnight alley, and in the course of five minutes of waiting, a single crewman had strolled across the dim runways.
"Any further in, we're liable to take a laser to the noggin," Otto said.
Walt nodded. "Fuck these guys."
Otto dug out the detonator, clicked a home-built cap off the simple switch. "Fifteen minutes." He laughed, deep chuckles that bunched his sides. "For all the good that will do us."
He flipped the switch.
33