The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [125]
A vehicle made of great wheels hung there, latched onto them with clawlike grapnels. Or rather, a sphere compassed by wheels, something like a globe of the Earth mounted with rings around the poles and equator. An open portal was pointed toward them and a hand with a gun poked out of it.
Franklin yanked his head back into the ship as a jagged bolt of phlogiston struck the frame of the portal. Then, with a hoarse cry, he leaned back out and fired his own kraftpistole and had the satisfaction of seeing that arm withdrawn with great alacrity.
“How fast we fallin'?” Robert asked.
“We'll find out when we hit the ground,” Franklin replied. “At least they'll break our fall. But let's see if we can't drop a few grenados into that window in the meantime.”
When Oglethorpe's saber broke, he knew he was a dead man, and though he would have hit the ships with a stone, still they were too far away. His mount was long dead, but even mounted—too far.
He couldn't imagine why he was still alive, anyway. More than miraculous, it seemed perverse. But he was alive, with the battle still surging around him. Just now, he wasn't in reach of an enemy—his men had formed a hollow square around him, and the French were accounting for themselves on his right flank. God knew where the Swedes had gotten to. Now that he was in the valley itself, his perspective on the carnage was limited, to say the least.
He stumbled to the ground from sheer weariness, and noticed a tomahawk someone had dropped. He tried to pick it up, and found that he could, just barely. His arms were lead pipes, uninterested in defending him even once more.
One of the regulars nearest him dropped, sobbing, an arrow buried in his chest. Oglethorpe looked for the archer, but couldn't pick him out. Not that it mattered that much anyway. He spared another glance at the unattainable ships— even if they should reach them, they would be cut down by defenders on board.
Well, it had been a fair try.
A hot wind stirred, awash with the smell of thunderstorms and—something else. He ignored it at first, but the wind grew stronger, hotter, and then hot enough to be painful, and with it came a hurricane sound, and behind that a vast tearing, as if a titan were using the crescent Moon to reap a forest.
And indeed, in the distance, on the hilltop above the valley, the forest began to evaporate.
In that moment, whether locked in strangleholds or bludgeoning with ax or sword, a lot of men suddenly had second thoughts about the battle.
For perhaps the first time in history, two opposing armies retreated together, as fast as their legs would take them.
They hit the ground with enough force to rattle teeth and bone, but not enough to break them.
“That's it,” Franklin said. “We're down.” He unstrapped himself and drew his pistols. After the first grenade had bounced off the window frame, the occupants of the wheel ship had wisely closed it. Franklin wondered how many men that meant, but he almost didn't care. They had ruined his chance of stopping the dark engine short of the army, which meant Lenka was dead, and someone was going to pay for that.
No. There might still be time, time to find Lenka and reach the redoubts, which were already protected from the devilish engine.
He jumped out of the side hatch, grunting as he struck the uneven surface of the wheel ship. The impact hadn't done much to it—the frame was probably adamantium. Looking at it again, he felt a little better. It probably couldn't hold that many men.
It held a few, however, and they were struggling out of a hatch only half open, the rest blocked by the ship's unnatural position on the ground. Three were already out, and another still crawling from underneath. They hadn't seen him yet, and Franklin didn't have any nobility left in him. He aimed and shot one with his ordinary pistol. He missed, which drew their fire, but he didn't much care. Now that the aegis of his ship was