Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

sort of big cannon in the Liberé war, did you know?”
    “I didn’t.” But David wasn’t surprised. Many of the Vashons were.
    “So we don’t come in straight to the camp, mind you, but looking over the cliffs to the cove below. Getting the lay, she says. That monster whale is floating in the water, and everyone else is sort of moving about. We’re watching, trying to figure out where you might be tied up—but we know for certain that they’ve got you because we can see the troll that you left with, that red ribbon under her nose, standing over two others that are lying on the ground. Then all of a sudden…”
    Pausing, Dooley took another puff. Annika’s hand tightened onDavid’s—she knew what was coming. She’d heard this before. Her gaze met his, her eyes shining, her lips pressed into a tight line as if holding herself from blurting it out.
    Dooley drew it out, breathing a ring of smoke and nodding with satisfaction at its shape before continuing, “So there we were, up on that cliff, looking down at the camp, when a roar sounds above me as if the devil himself were being booted from Hell, riding a streak of burning brimstone across the sky. Vashon clobbers me from behind, throwing me to the ground like she’s decided to bash my face open”—he pointed to a cut on his bearded jaw—“but then she’s over the top of me, pinning me down, and I’m about to think that I’ll need to be telling her about my wife when the world explodes. It goes with a sound unlike any I’ve ever heard before, even more than when we saw Pegasus blow, you remember that?”
    David could never forget it. The enormous cargo airship had caught fire over a French port six years before and ignited the balloon. The force had shattered windows on the shops below, set fire to the docks, and had created so much heat that every nearby airship had burst and burned. Altogether, almost two thousand aviators and dockworkers had been killed. They’d called it the worst disaster since Inoka Mountain.
    “I remember,” he said.
    “The rocks beneath us shook, harder than any earthquake I’ve ever stood through, but not near as long. And then I look down, and I see that there’s a crater where the camp was, centered right between the first bunkhouse and the cove. That whale’s turned over in the water and the bunkhouses are in ruins. I thought it was a firebomb, though Vashon tells me that it’s not, it’s not like anything she’s ever seen before. Then we see that the ash is coming up over the glacier, so we think the volcano blew a rock.”
    David had been thinking the same, too, until he realized what it must have been. Astonished, he looked to Annika. “Di Fiore’s capsule?”
    Brows arched, she nodded wildly, lips still pressed flat.
    “We didn’t know anything of that, then. We raced down there, searching the remains of those bunkhouses for you, for anyone. But there wasn’t a single man who wasn’t killed, not a single thing still standing.”
    All those men dead, and all of them murderers who’d slaughtered the sailors in the whale. He couldn’t be sorry, but David would have liked them to receive justice another way—one that made them face up to what they’d done.
    And he’d have liked to believe that the capsule had reached the moon. But he couldn’t be sorry that Lorenzo hadn’t succeeded, either—and he was glad that Paolo hadn’t tried.
    “I don’t think that was the destiny he had in mind,” David said.
    Annika snorted. “But it might be the one he deserved.”
    Smiling, he glanced at her. “You are bloodthirsty.”
    “A bit.” She grinned. “And your Mr. Dooley isn’t done.”
    “For a good hour, we were searching through that rubble, then the ash started falling. Now, we’ve got our scarves, but not much else, and I’ve been on enough expeditions with you to recognize the danger we’re in if we breathe that. That whale’s belly up in the cove, so we can’t get into her. So we start along the beach toward Vik as fast as we can, and there’re dogs coming from everywhere after us, and we’re keeping just barely ahead, when all of the sudden there’s a noise from above us. There’s di Fiore’s ferry cruiser, and men shouting over her sides in a panic, screaming for help.”
    God. David had to laugh. “The laborers from the glacier camp?”
    “The very same ones. Their engine’s stalled from the ash, because they never closed up the vents—”
    Annika rolled her eyes,